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Tax Authority Turns to Software

The regional tax authority in Chemnitz, Germany is using search, retrieval and categorization software to help in criminal investigations.

Vienna, VA -- The regional tax authority in Chemnitz, Germany has begun using Convera's RetrievalWare search, retrieval and categorization software to assist in its ongoing criminal investigations.

Since May 2002, the Tax Evasion Bureau's investigative departments have been using the software to support their computer forensics initiatives by scouring and pinpointing evidence of tax fraud contained in large volumes of impounded data. More than 70 intelligence and law enforcement organizations in the United States and other countries currently use Convera's products for crime investigation and intelligence gathering and analysis.

Conducting knowledge-based searches through mushrooming volumes of data is a challenge faced by all authorities involved in criminal investigation. Tax employees at the fiscal authority in Chemnitz South are using RetrievalWare to support investigations of cases such as trade, industry, and capital investment tax fraud. Impounded data, such as documents hidden or stored on computer hard drives, are being searched to locate proof of criminal conduct or clues that will help further their investigations. The "wonder weapon", as the Tax Evasion Bureau describes Convera's RetrievalWare, has already proven its worth, quickly tracking down documents that were key to a number of critical cases and saving the authority a vast amount of time in its investigations.

The key factors in selecting RetrievalWare were its powerful pattern searching and semantic categorization capabilities, as well as the thorough services support provided by Convera. RetrievalWare's pattern searching capability has proven helpful when tracking names of people or places as names can be spelled in a number of different ways; RetrievalWare enables users to find documents even if names are misspelled. Should a search return no relevant results, investigators can rest assured that the information they are trying to locate does not actually exist within the database being searched. This feature - the ability to record no hits for certain search arguments and thereby to rule out certain individuals, places and so on - is especially important in the context of criminal investigation. - Jim McKay, justice editor