Data Scientist

**Job description**:
**About UN University (UNU)**:
The United Nations University (UNU) is an international community of scholars engaged in policy-oriented research, capacity development and dissemination of knowledge, furthering the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations. UNU’s mission is to contribute, through research and capacity building, to efforts to resolve the pressing global problems that are the concern of the United Nations and its Member States.

For the past four decades, United Nations University (UNU) has been a go-to think tank for impartial research on human survival, conflict prevention, sustainable development and welfare. With more than 400 researchers in 12 countries, UNU’s work spans the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, generating policy-relevant knowledge to effect positive global change. UNU maintains more than 200 collaborations with UN agencies and leading universities and research institutions across the globe.

**United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER)**:
UNU-WIDER is one of 14 research and training Institutes that comprise the think tanks in the UNU system.

UNU-WIDER is implementing a large research, capacity development, and policy engagement programme in South Africa, called Southern African - Towards Inclusive Economic Development (SA-TIED) in close collaboration with the National Treasury of South Africa. Building on the successful first phase of this programme, phase II of SA-TIED will continue to bring together world class researchers with policymakers to combat socio-economic challenges in South Africa but also in the broader southern African region. A big focus of SA‐TIED relates to its engagements with the policy‐making community as a partner. A key aspect of the programme is to generate robust empirical evidence and use it as a basis to encourage networking and discussion amongst people involved in policy processes across the participating organisations and civil society to bridge the gap between research and policy‐making. The programme played an important part in making anonymised administrative tax data available for research purposes at a Secure Data Facility at the National Treasury (NT-SDF) and is a key asset in the programme. The availability of administrative tax data for research has enabled many new avenues of research and has provided new perspectives on the South African economy and has dramatically improved the quality and breadth of evidence used to inform policy.

**Responsibilities**:
Based at the premises of the South African Revenue Services (SARS) in Pretoria, South Africa, the Data Scientists will prepare the tax data extractions and assist in strengthening the cooperation between UNU-WIDER, SARS and National Treasury.

The Data Scientists’ responsibilities include the following:
**1. **Prepare the data extractions**
- Write scripts to extract the administrative tax data, anonymize the data, perform quality assurance on the data, write extraction reports
- Perform basic consistency checks and set up sustainable methods to verify the similarity between successive extractions of the tax data for the National Treasury
- Assist substantively with related documentation and processes to ensure the timely delivery of data extractions to the National Treasury
- Work with the team in Pretoria to upload the data extraction to the NT-SDF server

**2. **Provide substantive support to data related queries**
- Attend to any data queries raised by SA-TIED stakeholders regarding the data, seek (within SARS) answers to data anomalies
- Investigate what data is collected by SARS, how it is captured, what variables it includes and whether it could be transferred to NT
- Investigate new datasets that can be extracted or merged with the SARS data

**3. **Prepare high-quality documentation on the data and documentation related to data extractions**
- Support with the preparation of data requests at the National Treasury
- Update the data plan and recommend changes to ensure timely delivery of extractions
- Support SARS to document their datasets and their systems, to produce metadata for the various datasets
- Create documentation that tracks changes in tax forms over time

**4. **Support work to identify tax non-compliance and revenue opportunities**
- Assist with PITMOD, VATMOD, CITMOD models at SARS
- Assist with data analysis at SARS

**5. Performs other duties as assigned by supervisor**

**Key performance indicators**:

- Timely data extractions transferred from SARS to the NT-SDF
- Produce quality documentation on the data and related processes
- Quality and timely assistance provided on data queries
- Support work to identify tax non-compliance

**Competencies**:
**Values**:

- ** Integrity** — act ethically, demonstrating the standards of conduct of the United Nations and taking prompt action in case of witnessing unprofessional or unethical behaviour, or any other breach of