This AI Startup Wants to Help Tax Agencies Catch Cheats — and Recover $1 Trillion a Year

A startup called Govra is pitching state and federal tax agencies on a new kind of audit assistant: AI agents that read government rules, comb through filings and flag discrepancies for a human official to review, rather than software that replaces the official outright. The company was named to Forbes' inaugural Agentic 20 list, a ranking of AI agents the publication says are doing substantive work rather than simple chatbot tasks.

How it works

Govra's platform converts complex statutes and regulations into executable workflows that research the applicable law, reconcile records across data sources, identify gaps between what a filer reported and what the evidence shows, and assemble a case file for a public servant to make the final call. California's Department of Tax and Fee Administration has already run a pilot, and Indiana is preparing one of its own; an official there has said the tool could let the state run 20% to 30% more audits with the same staff.

Govra CEO Josh Sandler frames the pitch as a win for compliant taxpayers rather than just a revenue grab, arguing that catching cheats faster lowers the burden on everyone who already pays what they owe. He has pointed to the roughly $1 trillion annual U.S. tax gap — the difference between taxes owed and taxes actually collected — as the opportunity, projecting that similar tools could eventually help agencies nationwide recover close to that amount every year.