Approximately 200 auditors, administrative and support personnel will use FARSTaR to help manage their work—real-time, on-line, fully automated, and without paper. Auditors and management now have rapid, paperless access to four years of detailed tax return data, tax documents, third-party reports, state and federal tax laws, law changes, administrative rules, court cases and other information. An automated audit tracking and management system provides supervisory tools that facilitate the downloading of new audit assignments, uploading of updated and final audit files, time and expense reporting, progress tracking and other management and tracking capabilities.

Potential audit cases are selected by using an automated rules-based system that automatically extracts the required data from the Treasury data warehouse before processing the data against the rules base. Then data is extracted through an industry standard ODBC interconnect with ANSI standard SQL calls. The selection staff can directly access data from the data warehouse to complete an analysis of the taxpayer or to review the results of the rules processing. The audit assignment staff can either accept the case as a candidate for audit or elect to move it to a "reviewed, but not recommended for audit" category. All results of the screening processes are stored in the data warehouse for future review. Once a supervisor electronically assigns a case to an auditor an electronic audit case file is generated with all relevant taxpayer data that is downloaded from the data warehouse, rules base findings, manual screening results and audit instructions.

The entire system is protected with a state-of-the-art PKI security solution that provides strong 128-bit encryption of all audit data that is sent to, sent from and/or stored on the auditor's and supervisor's desktop and laptop systems.

With the implementation of FARSTaR, the Revenue Compliance Bureau has dramatically transformed its management of the audit and compliance process. The Bureau has taken an unwieldy and inefficient system that once frustrated our staff and taxpayers alike, and reinvented it to create an equitable and efficient 21st century model for states across the country to emulate.

Contact Information: Stanley Borawski, Assistant Administrator, Michigan Department of Treasury, Tax Compliance Center, 1001 Terminal Road, Lansing, MI 48913, (517) 335-8739, borawskis@state.mi.us

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