<p>As tax season in the US comes to a close, the nation's tax agency is aiming to ramp up its technological capabilities. </p> <p>In an informational posting on April 2, the Internal Revenue Service <a href="https://beta.sam.gov/opp/5eb4fcfbdfd342bd94c0af400dbcca38/view?keywords=cryptocurrency&amp;sort=-modifiedDate&amp;index=&amp;is_active=true&amp;page=1&amp;date_filter_index=0&amp;inactive_filter_values=false">revealed</a> ambitious plans to digitize operations in fiscal year 2021. The initiative includes a shift away from paper, an emphasis on extracting data from poor-quality images and developing new tools based on artificial intelligence and machine learning.</p> <p>The AI and machine learning projects specifically aim to develop automated customer service "chatbots" and to better track cryptocurrency transactions.</p> <p>The listing reads: "The IRS utilizes publicly available sources of information regarding cryptocurrency, and an initiative to bring in public, open-source data for necessary deconfliction and analytics could demonstrate value to the Service." </p> <p>The IRS envisions AI and machine learning drawing on many data inputs to find information on crypto services:</p> <blockquote> <p>"An automated process would be established to ingest data into an environment for agency-wide access. Open source data could consist of scrapped dark web/clear web information, social media, public records/filings, and technical components such as available Domain Name Registration (DNS), Geolocational IP data, etc."</p> </blockquote> <p>The past week has found the IRS heavily involved in crypto. The tax agency is involved in two court actions seeking information on clients of <a href="https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/100275/irs-serves-circle-request-customer-records">USDC issuer Circle</a> and users of <a href="https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/100381/irs-kraken-petition-court-john-doe-summons">crypto exchange Kraken</a>.</p> <p>The IRS's press officer had not responded to The Block's request for comment as of press time.</p>