Tax Calculation Graph Change Analysis Engine
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Solution Overview
Problem
Tax return preparation systems lack the ability to effectively analyze changes in tax data and provide clear explanations for resulting changes in tax calculations, making it difficult for users to understand how modifications to tax data impact their tax results.
Innovation Solution
A tax preparation system utilizing declarative data structures, such as completeness graphs and tax calculation graphs, that includes a change analysis engine to compare different tax calculation graphs and generate explanations for changes in tax results by identifying changed or unchanged nodes and using associated explanation data.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If a tax preparation system uses traditional calculation methods, then tax calculations can be performed, but the system cannot effectively analyze changes in tax data or provide clear explanations for resulting changes in tax results
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the tax calculation system into distinct computational graphs where each node represents a specific tax calculation element. This segmentation enables tracking of individual data flows and their impacts on final tax results, allowing the system to provide explanations for changes without requiring complete system redesign.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces computational graphs as intermediary structures between tax data input and final tax calculations. These graphs serve as mediators that capture the relationships and dependencies between various tax data elements, enabling the system to analyze and explain how changes in input data affect tax results.
2Loss of information
If the system provides detailed explanations for tax calculation changes, then user understanding improves, but the processing time and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs preliminary construction of computational graphs that map out all possible data dependencies and calculation paths before actual tax calculations are executed. This preliminary action enables the system to quickly generate explanations by simply traversing the pre-built graphs rather than analyzing calculation relationships in real-time.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates computational graph representations that are copies or abstractions of the actual tax calculation processes. These graph copies capture the essential relationships and dependencies without requiring the full computational overhead of the original calculations, enabling efficient analysis and explanation generation.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems, methods and articles of manufacture for performing a comparison of tax results based on different sets of tax data, and generating an explanation as to why the tax results differ or do not differ due to the differences in the tax data. The system includes a computing device, a data store in communication with the computing device and a tax preparation software application executable by the computing device. The tax preparation software application has a tax calculation engine, a tax calculation graph, and a change analysis engine. The tax calculation engine is configured to perform a plurality of tax calculation operations based on the tax calculation graph. The change analysis engine is configured to determine whether tax results based on different tax data differ or do not differ. The system may also generate explanation(s) of the reasons that the tax results differ or do not differ due to the different tax data.