Empowering Structured Information Extraction from Tax Forms

The Challenge

The explosion of unstructured data is one of the defining challenges of the modern digital era and the financial industry is at the center of it.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), 80% of global data will be unstructured by 2025 arriving in formats like text, images, PDFs, scanned documents, and more. For financial organizations that rely on structured, accurate data for decision-making, this creates a significant operational challenge.

A client in the financial services sector approached InferIQ to build a solution capable of extracting structured data from standard US tax return forms. The required extraction involved key-value pairs from form fields, content from tables, and checkbox fields across both digital and scanned PDF documents. The presence of scanned files in the dataset added an additional layer of complexity, requiring intelligent OCR capabilities to handle varying document quality accurately.

At the time, the Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) market was approaching $1.1 billion in value a clear signal that the need for smarter document extraction solutions was rapidly growing across the industry.

The Solution

After evaluating multiple tool options, InferIQ built a purpose-built extraction solution on top of AWS Textract combining intelligent pre-processing, accurate OCR, and structured data output in a single pipeline.

The solution handled the full extraction workflow end-to-end:

Pre-processing was applied to improve the clarity of scanned and image-based documents before extraction began significantly improving accuracy on lower-quality files.

AWS Textract then performed intelligent extraction of key-value pairs from form fields, tabular content from tables, and checkbox field states handling the full range of data types found in standard US tax forms.

The extracted data was structured and exported as a .csv file, ready to serve as a direct input for downstream data analytics workflows eliminating the need for any manual reformatting or cleanup.

The Impact

By automating tax form data extraction, the client was able to dramatically reduce the time and effort required to process financial documents for analysis.

Each file that previously required manual data entry and formatting is now processed automatically saving approximately 30 minutes per file. The solution also supported scanned PDFs natively, removing a capability gap that had previously required workarounds.

With structured, analytics-ready CSV output generated automatically, the client's team was able to feed data directly into downstream workflows without additional preparation improving the speed and consistency of financial analysis across the board.