Mastercard Incorporated
Payment card network data validation system

Abstract:

A method for validating tax data of a taxable entity comprises: receiving at a computer processor, payment card transaction records including at least one of a customer identifier, a merchant identifier, and transaction purchase amounts corresponding to entity purchase transactions over a given time period; analyzing the payment card transaction records data to generate one or more spending profiles according to one or more categories of merchants; correlating the entity spending profiles with one or more other aggregated spending profiles representative of historical spending by additional entities whose reported income is within a given range of the entity reported income; comparing the degree of correlation with a threshold and generating a signal indicative of a request for secondary review of a tax filing of the entity when the degree of correlation is below the threshold; and otherwise generating a signal indicative of a validated tax filing of the entity.