Development of an Expert Computer System to Assist in the Classification of Estate Tax Returns

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) undertook a research project to determine the feasibility of using an expert system to examine estate tax returns. An expert system performs tasks normally performed by experts, and its requirements include: 1. The decision to be modeled must be important enough to justify the cost of system development. 2. The knowledge used in the decision must not be easily obtained by a nonexpert. 3. The system must have the highest benefit-to-cost ratio of all alternatives. 4. Experts must be able to organize the knowledge base into a set of relationships. One of the first goals of a prototype expert system built for the IRS is to free estate tax attorneys from the first round of return classification. The system was developed in the following steps: 1. Knowledge acquisition, 2. programming, 3. debugging, and 4. demonstrations. Some functional characteristics have been added to the system in preparation for an 18-month pilot study scheduled to begin in the fall of 1988.