HMRC awards 175 million AI contract to British firm Quantexa to close 46.8 billion tax gap

"HM Revenue and Customs has awarded a 175 million pound, ten-year contract to Quantexa, a London-based AI company, to modernise the tax authority's data infrastructure and deploy artificial intelligence to detect fraud, fix errors, and close the tax gap. The contract is one of the largest AI deals in UK public sector history. It is also a sovereignty statement. The UK government has spent more than 900 million pounds on contracts with Palantir, the American data analytics firm, across at least ten departments including the NHS."

"The Quantexa deal is the opposite of a Palantir deal. The company is British. The data stays inside HMRC's environment. The decision was deliberate. The tax gap, the difference between what is owed to the exchequer and what is actually collected, reached 46.8 billion pounds in 2023-24. The government has committed to recovering an additional ten billion pounds per year by 2030. Quantexa's job is to help find it."

"Quantexa was founded in 2016 by Vishal Marria, who had been the youngest executive director at Ernst and Young, where he led anti-financial crime technology programmes for international banks. The company builds what it calls a Decision Intelligence platform, software that connects data from multiple sources, resolves entities across datasets, and uses graph analytics and machine learning to identify patterns that humans cannot see at scale. Its original use case was anti-money laundering in banking."

"HSBC was an early customer. The technology that helped a bank detect suspicious transactions between shell companies now helps a tax authority detect suspicious patterns across millions of tax retu"

HM Revenue and Customs awarded a £175 million, ten-year contract to London-based Quantexa to modernise its data infrastructure and deploy artificial intelligence. The system is intended to detect tax fraud, correct errors, and help close the tax gap, which reached £46.8 billion in 2023-24. The government aims to recover an additional £10 billion per year by 2030, and Quantexa’s work is positioned as support for that goal. The deal is framed as a sovereignty shift away from prior spending with the American data analytics firm Palantir. Quantexa is described as British, with data kept inside HMRC’s environment. Quantexa’s platform connects multiple data sources, resolves entities across datasets, and uses graph analytics and machine learning to find patterns at scale.

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