The ATO is turning to technology to help its tax avoidance taskforce.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has announced a new network analytics solution called ‘ANGIE’, which is designed to discern complex, multi-layered relationships between clients.

ANGIE - the Automated Network & Grouping Identification Engine - will identify and group clients to understand their relationships, revealing “patterns of interest” and visualising new links between clients.

It will be underpinned by a graph database, which tenders have been opened for, to represent complex networks by storing data about entities and mapping their relationships.

Consulting firm McKinsey completed a “high-level end-to-end design of ANGIE” last year, which found that “a native graph database would enable significant processing and performance speed, capturing more detailed information … across the organisation”.

It is a model that some experts expect will be taken up by the global tax enforcement group J5, which includes revenue authorities from the US, UK, Australia, the Netherlands and Canada.