Accounting
Archeologists uncover ancient Roman tax fraud case in desert
Archeologists have uncovered a set of court documents for an ancient Roman tax fraud and forgery case in the then-province of Judea connected to sham transactions involving the sale and manumission of slaves.
More specifically, they discovered and translated a Greek papyrus that was found to be a memorandum for a judicial hearing before a Roman official during the reign of Hadrian, after the emperor’s visit to the region in 129/130 CE and before the outbreak of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132, said the
The archeologists note that the condition of the scroll means many details remain unknown, such as the precise location of the trial or the citizenship status of the defendants. One thing they do know, however, is that the case had two main defendants: one man named Gadalias and another named Saulos, who both stood accused of corrupt dealings.
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Gadalias was the son of a notary and archival official “and therefore presumably belonged to the officeholding class of his community.” The scroll characterized him as a corrupt individual who was known to the authorities as having a history of violence, extortion, counterfeiting, and inciting rebellion. For instance, the text mentions a previous hearing before a Roman official named Postumus during which a document presented by Gadalias was found to have been forged or manipulated.
Meanwhile, Saulos was named as a friend of Gadalias and his partner-in-crime, though it seems little else about his background was mentioned. However, he is believed to have been the prime instigator of the scheme. While Gadalias is better known, the authors believe “his role in the events seems to have been limited to facilitating the manipulation of documents by virtue of his position as the son of the local chreophylax” (a kind of financial official).
The scheme
The archeologists, once again noting that many details are missing, said their best interpretation of the accusation is that Saulos approached an associate named Chaereas, who owed him money. Saulos apparently directed him to engage in a sham transaction where Chaereas paid to “buy” several of his slaves while retaining possession himself. Afterwards, the document says, Saulos and his father then freed these slaves in Chaereas’ name without paying the required taxes.
The scholars aren’t entirely clear on what fee was evaded. They theorize it could have been a 4% tax on direct slave sales, a 5% tax on manumission by Roman citizens, a poll tax that slave owners were obligated to pay on behalf of their slaves (ownership of slaves was a matter of official record and entered into census counts), a toll on imported slaves (up to 25% depending on province), or birth registration fees for houseborn slaves.
They’re also not entirely clear on why the scheme was enacted. The most likely explanation, they said, was that Saulos wanted to conceal his assets from the Roman government by nominally alienating his own slaves to Chaereas. By pretending to sell off his slaves or buying them without using his own name, Saulos may have sought to lower his recorded wealth in order to diminish his tax burden and evade the costly and time-consuming public service obligations imposed by the Roman state on persons above a certain wealth threshold. He may also have tried to avoid paying existing or expected debts or penalties to the state. The document itself describes similar types of schemes where individuals cheat their property assessment by, say, deliberately cutting down vines and trees or avoiding the registration of slaves in the census.
The authors believe Saulos may have been nominally selling off young slaves (who had never been entered into the census) before they entered the age of tax liability. The undeclared status of these slaves might explain how they got caught, as the registration of the sale could have been the first time ever a particular slave was reported to the provincial administration — this was at a time when it was customary to provide registered documentation of the slave’s previous ownership, as well as birth declarations and census returns demonstrating they had been properly declared with all taxes paid.
“If any documentation was missing or appeared dubious, this could have sparked an inquest by Roman fiscal officials that resulted in desperate attempts to manipulate or forge the necessary documents by Saulos and his collaborators,” said the paper.
The authors do offer another possible motive: Saulos was Jewish, which meant he had religious obligations regarding the treatment of slaves. He could have freed the slaves that were “bought” in order to possibly take advantage of a provision outlined in Leviticus (25:47–54) which states a Jewish slave sold to a non-Jewish owner must be redeemed by a fellow Jew, who then becomes his master; or because he simply wanted to free Jewish slaves but did not want to pay taxes on doing so. On this latter motivation, the authors said this could be because of obligations of Jews at the time to free Jewish slaves after seven years of service, or simply because they wanted to. However, the actual ethnicity of the slaves in question is not confirmed.
And what of the accused forger, Gadalias? The prosecutor expected he would say he knew nothing of the forgery, and that if the documents had been falsified, that was because of his father, who conveniently enough was already dead. However, even if that were the case, he would still be liable for simply presenting the false documents, as well as for the financial damage that resulted from the forgery. Despite his protestations of good faith, he was also accused of deliberately withholding documents from Roman authorities in the course of the investigation (essentially, obstruction).
“Ultimately, even if Gadalias could persuade the judge that he was acting in good faith and the dubious document was drafted under his father, financial damages due to the fiscus as a result of the fraud were still heritable by him on his father’s behalf,” said the paper.
Prosecutors apparently argued that the pair had been convicted previously for counterfeiting coins, which established both their history of criminal activity as well as the fact that, despite the attempted blame-shifting, they work together. They also mentioned Gadalias’ many other crimes.
The specific outcome of the hearing is unknown. However, the authors believe that the very fact that the document’s existence — as well as its discovery in a desert cave — indicates that the case was not closed.
“It may be argued that the very survival of [the papyrus] indicates that the case was not yet closed at the end of the hearing. It is remarkable that this record, which was per se of an ephemeral nature, was not only retained but also brought by its possessor to the caves of the Judaean desert during the Bar Kokhba rebellion. This testifies to the enduring importance of the document, and may be a sign that the case had not reached its conclusion,” said the paper.
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Stampli Procure-to-Pay, which uses the company’s AI assistant Billy the Bot, has the ability to turn plain conversational text into structured purchase orders and financial documents, replacing rote data entry. Stampli observed that procurement often involves dynamic conversations between multiple stakeholders, such as finance teams, employees and vendors. These conversations, though, tend to take place on separate channels, emails and chat tools versus the procurement platform itself, which breaks the audit trail.
The conversation-first approach, on the other hand, allows the software to capture and contextualize all procurement discussions within each transaction’s workflow. It can support an existing intake process, approval workflow or business requirement. The system uses AI-powered approval flows guided by historical patterns. It automatically suggests preferred items and vendors based on an analysis of purchasing patterns. The program generates formatted purchase orders directly within customers’ ERP systems.
“Only Stampli unifies all procurement processes, documents and discussion into a single intelligent workflow,” said Stampli CEO and co-founder Eyal Feldman. “Everything happens within Stampli: every step, every approval, every budget review, and every conversation, in perfect harmony with your ERP.”
For example, according to the CEO in a later email, a user could describe their office supply needs in plain language. Billy the Bot analyzes the text and extracts the item names, quantity and context, then maps them to stock-keeping units, descriptions and costs. This process requires no special training and is designed to encourage employees to use the system and not try to bypass or ignore it, which creates challenges in terms of compliance as well as workflow efficiency.
Stampli said its new solution can be implemented within weeks. Once deployed, it will adapt to existing processes, reducing the amount of necessary change management.
The announcement comes a few months after the
Cloud ERP solutions provider
“Acumatica’s AI capabilities are designed to automate and eliminate error-prone manual processes and enable businesses to intelligently streamline workflows across industries,” said Acumatica chief engineering officer Miten Mehta. “From Generative AI assistants to smart automated sales workflows tailored to unique operational needs, our tools integrate seamlessly into existing workflows, making them immediately impactful. We’ve created a stable, secure foundation, ensuring businesses can confidently integrate AI technologies into their processes—whether AI-powered anomaly detection in manufacturing or intelligent assistants in construction—driving real, measurable results.”
Two major components of this will be enhancements to Acumatica Labs as well as the release of Acumatica AI Studio. Acumatica Labs will include a new customer preview program that enables early access to new features for testing and direct feedback, as well as advanced kitting, order orchestration, customer special orders, case closure notes, B2B ordering, document templates and AI-powered anomaly detection for those who sign up.
Meanwhile, Acumatica AI Studio—a new feature in the larger platform—will let businesses automate their workflows without having to code. Chief Technology Officer Mikhail Shchelkonogov, during his presentation, showed how he could use it to automate report production, using the example of support case reports. After their engineering staff helps a customer with a technical issue, they must take all the case activities, analyze them, and report on things like what the problem was, what the root cause of that problem was, and how it was fixed, among other things. This is a complicated multi-step process. But Shchelkonogov, with the AI Studio, created a single button that directs the AI to gather all the information from the support case and then send it to the large language model to produce the report itself. He noted the AI even knew he spent 4 hours and 15 minutes working on that particular support case.
He explained how he set up the button himself through the AI Prompt Editor that is part of the AI Studio. Effectively, the button activates a prompt he had already prepared which specified things such as the items he wanted to include in the closure notes, the format of the report itself, and additional information to be used to enrich the text (e.g. product descriptions from the Acumatica website.) He then tested the results, refined the prompt to his satisfaction and completed the automation.
“Number one, I did not write a single line of code to do that. Number two, it was very fast. Number three, think of how many actions I automated. Now you can take it and go to any screen in Acumatica, think of the scenario you want to implement, and do it by yourself,” said Shchelkonogov.
The AI Studio also provides data-driven insights in a secure environment. For example, during his presentation Doug Johnson, vice president of solution architecture, raised the example of an Alaskan company that makes scratch off lottery tickets. The insights feature combed through hundreds of thousands of records to find which of their salespeople were discounting too heavily, which were selling below margin and other performance statistics. They also used it to determine who was overdue with their bills (Johnson noted that billing can be challenging in Alaska due to mail delays, so standard patterns won’t work). They were able to find this information by entering a simple data query, which gathered the information and put it on a dashboard “so instead of 100,000 or a million records, you only have to look at 15.”
“Another thing here is the [AI determined] average days to pay. It varies wildly by customer. That is what AI really helps with, so they can focus on the right problem instead of focusing on people who just have mail issues at their place,” he said.
Acumatica also announced several industry-specific solutions for the distribution, manufacturing, construction, retail and professional services industries. For professional services, Acumatica plans to implement a native
At this time, Acumatica hasn’t shared specific release dates for these updates.
Senate Finance Committee chairman Mike Crapo. R-Idaho, and ranking member Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, issued a
The
“As the tax filing season gets underway, this draft legislation suggests practical ways to improve the taxpayer experience,” Crapo and Wyden said in a joint statement. “These adjustments to the laws governing IRS procedure are designed to facilitate communication between the agency and taxpayers, streamline processes for tax compliance and disputes and ensure taxpayers have access to timely expert assistance.”
The discussion draft includes policies that would:
- Require the IRS to improve “math error” notices so that taxpayers are better positioned to timely respond to them;
- Streamline review of offers-in-compromise to facilitate the taxpayers’ resolution of tax debts;
- Simplify foreign bank account report (FBAR) compliance so that fewer taxpayers will fail to file key forms;
- Clarify and expand Tax Court jurisdiction so that more taxpayers can pursue their claims in an appropriate venue;
- Expand the independence of the National Taxpayer Advocate (NTA) from the IRS;
- Increase civil and criminal penalties on tax professionals that deliberately take actions to harm their clients;
- Expand taxpayer access to the IRS Independent Office of Appeals;
- Extend the so-called “mailbox rule” to electronic submissions so that taxpayers have certainty their materials are submitted on time;
- Protect taxpayers by adopting reasonable standards and due process for issuing and revoking return Preparer Tax Identification Numbers, or PTINs;
- Strengthen the IRS whistleblower program while protecting the confidentiality of taxpayer information;
- Protect hostages from unfair tax processes and penalties.
The proposals in the discussion draft reflect in many ways nonpartisan legislative proposals recommended by the National Taxpayer Advocate, along with standalone tax administrative bills introduced by congressional members. The provisions aim to reduce or eliminate challenges faced by taxpayers and other stakeholders within the current federal tax administrative system.
“This bipartisan draft bill, several years in the making, would significantly strengthen taxpayer rights in nearly every facet of tax administration,” said National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins in a statement. “I encourage taxpayers and the tax professional community to carefully review the draft and provide feedback to refine it, and I encourage Congress to prioritize the passage of this common sense bill to ensure stronger protections for taxpayers and a more fair and transparent tax system.”
The AICPA expressed its support Thursday for the discussion draft, and said it strongly supports and endorses the following provisions found in the Taxpayer Assistance and Service Act:
- Sec. 101. Scanning and Digitization of Tax Returns and Correspondence.
- Sec. 102. Establishment of Dashboard to Inform Taxpayers of Backlogs and Wait Times.
- Sec. 103. Expansion of Electronic Access to Information about Refunds.
- Sec. 104. Expansion of Callback Technology and Online Accounts.
- Sec. 105. Improvement of Notices of Math or Clerical Error.
- Sec. 108. Individuals Facing Economic Hardships Informed of Collection Alternatives.
- Sec. 112. Postponement of Certain Deadlines by Reason of Disasters Made Applicable to Limitation on Credit or Refund.
- Sec. 116. Modification of Rules for Postponing Certain Deadlines by Reason of Disaster.
- Sec. 405. Operations to Assist Taxpayers Experiencing Hardships During a Lapse in Appropriation.
- Sec. 504. Authority to Deny, Revoke, or Suspend Preparer Tax Identification Numbers.
- Sec. 903. Quarterly Installments for Estimated Income Tax Payments by Individuals.
- Sec. 904. Establishment of a Failure-to-Pay Penalty Safe Harbor for Individuals.
- Sec. 905. Extension of Mailbox Rule to Electronic Submissions and Payments.
“We are grateful to Senators Wyden and Crapo for putting together a thoughtful package that will provide much-needed support to taxpayers,” said Melanie Lauridsen, vice president of tax policy and advocacy for the AICPA, in a statement. “When passed, the TAS Act will be one of the most significant tax packages we will have seen in recent years. It will be instrumental in establishing a foundation that helps simplify some of the laborious tax filing processes and allows taxpayers to better meet their tax obligations. We look forward to working with Senators Wyden and Crapo as this discussion draft moves forward.”
The Government Accountability Office released a
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