The Revenue Department is preparing to introduce a chatbot to offer answers to taxpayers online as a new channel for virtual tax consultation, says director-general Lavaron Sangsnit.
He said the department is in talks with Microsoft Corp regarding use of the ChatGPT app to answer tax questions.
This scheme is meant to facilitate taxpayers who have questions with the aim to reduce tax disputes, said Mr Lavaron.
If deployed, it would mark the first time that various department tax documents would be digitally scanned in one place for easy retrieval by ChatGPT, including the Revenue Code (the body of tax law used by the department), tax court judgements on various matters and common taxpayer questions.
Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI, the company that created artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT.
The system can analyse enormous amounts of digital text, including books, Wikipedia articles, computer programs and chat logs, which requires high computing power.
OpenAI released its AI chatbot in late November 2022.
Part of a digital roadmap to bring more than 10 million taxpayers into the digital tax system, the department has allowed authorised service providers to act as agents for taxpayers who wish to enter the formal tax system.
The department's digital roadmap aims to achieve the following: service providers must be able to submit electronic tax documents to the department and store tax documents electronically by the end of 2023; service providers must be able to prepare information and file tax returns on behalf of the taxpayer by 2024; large businesses must be able to create electronic tax invoices by 2025 and file tax returns electronically by 2027; and all entrepreneurs must be able to file tax returns electronically by 2028.
For fiscal 2023, the government is expected to collect net revenue of 2.49 trillion baht, of which 61.3% is collected by the Revenue Department, 22.7% by the Excise Department, 3.9% by the Customs Department and the remainder by other state agencies.
The Revenue Department is the highest tax collection agency, according to the Comptroller-General's Department.
For the first eight months of fiscal 2023, the department collected 1.30 trillion baht, exceeding the target by 134 billion baht, or 11.5%.