By: Staff Writer
July 28, 2026
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in tax administration in the Caribbean will make tax collection limitless.
Dr. Ashni Singh, Senior Minister in the Office of the President with Responsibility for Finance in Guyana, said at the 27th General Assembly and Technical Conference of the Caribbean Organisation of Tax Administrators (COTA) in Georgetown, Guyana that: “Without taking away from, in any way, our unreserved recognition of the remarkable progress that has been made in improving and modernizing tax administration, I think it would be fair to say that recent technological developments, particularly in relation to big data, machine learning, and the tools of data science and data analytics have opened a whole new host of possibilities that were hitherto not available to us.
“Today we have tools available, readily available, that allow for data mining at a speed and with an efficiency and with a degree of sophistication that just a few years ago were simply not available, and there are few examples of areas in public administration where these tools and technologies have the potential to yield have the potential to yield as significant benefits as they could.
“There are few examples of areas of public administration in which these technologies can yield benefits as tremendous as they can in the tax administration, because if you consider, for example, today the speed with which we can examine data submitted in relation to declarations, prices, volumes, declared values, and conduct very sophisticated analytics on this data, with a dizzying speed, in nanoseconds, the possibilities are almost boundless, almost limitless.”
He also said: “And notwithstanding the gains that we have made at the GRA (Guyana Revenue Authority), I am sure that you would agree with me, Commissioner General, that we are still to realize the full potential of these exciting new possibilities offered by AI and big data. And so I believe that the consideration, and I know that at the international level, a lot of work has gone into considering.
“I know the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), there’s been a lot of work on the possibilities offered by AI and its everything else that falls under that nomenclature, the possibilities that are unlocked by these digital tools that are now available to us.
“I know that the IMF, in its fiscal affairs department, its revenue administration divisions of its fiscal affairs department, I know that there too, a lot of work has been done on examining the potential of digitization to unlock exciting possible in transforming the efficiency, the operations, and the efficient, the operational efficiency, perhaps, of revenue administrations and increasing revenue yields.
“And so, these, the deliberations over the next few days that you will be here, and the subject matter that you’ve chosen to address, I believe, are very timely. I think this is a very timely topic, and I want to urge that we take advantage of the opportunity to get ourselves acquainted with cutting-edge thought on how information technology, AI in particular, and AI tools can be used to transform tax administrations.”