Lionbridge Helps State Governments Manage High-volume Tax Season and Close the Tax Gap With Crowd-based Data Management Solutions

WALTHAM, Mass., Feb. 25, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- At this week's Crowdopolis event in New York, NY, Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: LIOX) will present its suite of Data Management solutions for tax processing that allow state governments' departments of revenue to collect, cleanse and process vital tax data. These tax processing solutions, powered by Lionbridge's 100,000+ qualified crowd professionals and its secure task management platform, enable departments of revenue to:

• Manage fluctuating workloads that impact revenue departments each tax season.
• Cost-effectively manage the high volume of data processing needs during tax season.
• Capture the tax data necessary to conduct analytics and help close the tax gap.
• Increase local jobs by directing tax processing tasks to qualified professionals within each state's jurisdictions, rather than outsourcing to third-party providers. 

Lionbridge Enterprise Crowdsourcing (ECS) Practice Manager Dori Albert will present on this topic at Crowdopolis on February 28, 2013 at 9:25 a.m. at Digital Sandbox, 55 Broad Street - 4th Floor New York City, NY 10004.

According to the IRS, the estimated annual tax gap is $385 billion which comes from non-filing, under reporting and under payment. According to the U.S. Department of Treasury, the IRS collects $2.4 trillion each tax year from an estimated 234 million tax returns. Despite the proliferation of the Internet, approximately 15 percent or 35 million tax returns are still submitted in paper form.  State governments face similar challenges of closing tax gaps by capturing structured and unstructured data from millions of tax returns and W2s and performing necessary analytics to identify and prevent fraud.

"Typically, workload fluctuations around tax season require departments to hire seasonal staff or work second shifts to accommodate increased demands, which creates logistical headaches and increases costs," said Martha Crow, Senior Vice President, Global Enterprise Crowdsourcing at Lionbridge. "Lionbridge ECS helps departments capture and cleanse the data allowing them to more effectively and efficiently analyze it, which can save government agencies billions of dollars each year. Our elastic workforce model and secure platform ensures quality, security and efficiency.  As a result, with Lionbridge ECS, state departments of revenue can close the tax gap to increase revenue and reduce costs."

For more than 10 years Lionbridge ECS has managed tax processing programs for several state governments using a qualified crowd of data conversion specialists and a highly secure task management platform.   With Lionbridge ECS' Data Management solutions, state governments can convert paper returns and unstructured data into electronic forms—including all data within tax returns and W2s—allowing them to perform analysis on the 35 million paper tax returns being filed every year. In the past, this data capture and cleansing was cost prohibitive and could only be accomplished with costly manual labor models or by utilizing recognition technology that could only provide a partial data set.  Enterprise Crowdsourcing helps agencies close this massive tax gap by capturing structured and unstructured data from returns and W2s which empowers departments to perform analytics that can identify and prevent fraud and result in billions of dollars in tax revenue.

Lionbridge ECS has a unique, technology-enabled solution that provides unparalleled security, breaking the form fields into unrelated, non-contextual snippets prior to leaving the protection of client's facility.  Then a team of pre-qualified data conversion specialists capture and confirm the data. Once the data is captured and confirmed, the snippets are then reassembled behind the security of the client's firewall. Sensitive documents never leave the premises in context, ensuring that the sensitive tax data is fully secure.

Lionbridge ECS' Data Management solutions to improve tax processing include:

• DataCapture – A data entry solution that is 99.99 percent accurate and reduces data entry costs by as much as 40 percent. Clients gain instant access to a 24x7, highly scalable team of remote data conversion specialists using a system designed to ensure 100 percent security.
• Data Enrichment – This solution specializes in expanding clients' data sets with new content globally, adding new information, meta data tags, attributes and annotations that improve data assets.
• Big Data Cleansing, Classification and Normalization – Lionbridge ECS aggregates all structured and unstructured data into the same format to enable clients to perform their own Big Data analytics. This includes everything from transcribing audio files to digitizing images to adding index tags to data and more to ensure all information is normalized and analytics ready.

About Lionbridge Enterprise Crowdsourcing

Lionbridge Enterprise Crowdsourcing (ECS) is a $150 million practice of Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. Lionbridge's ECS division is dedicated to leading the next generation of outsourcing by leveraging its secure, enterprise-scale crowdsourcing model to help enterprises increase productivity, maximize workforce elasticity and reduce workforce costs. Its proprietary cloud-based technology platform provides an innovative and secure solution to manage the transformative workflows to quickly drive high-quality task results. This platform, combined with Lionbridge ECS's global crowd of more than 100,000 educated, pre-qualified professionals, provides a robust crowdsourcing solution that offers optimal results for any business project. For more information, please visit www.thesmartcrowd.com.

About Lionbridge

Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: LIOX) is a $457 million provider of globalization solutions.  We provide translation, online marketing, global content management and application testing solutions that ensure global brand consistency, local relevancy and technical usability across all touch points of the customer lifecycle.  Using our innovative cloud technology platforms and our global crowd of more than 100,000 professionals, we enable more than 800 world-leading brands to increase international market share, speed adoption of products and effectively engage their customers in local markets worldwide.  Based in Waltham, Mass., Lionbridge maintains solution centers in 26 countries. To learn more, visit http://www.lionbridge.com.

Contact Info:
Sara Buda
Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.
[email protected]
+1-781-434-6190

SOURCE Lionbridge Technologies, Inc.