A study this year found that, among citizens of Patria whose tax

hi ,
not convinced much by your elaboration can explain further means as what i have asked can you make me understand by options
thanks

However I selected wrong choice, I can explain POE in following way -
1. Out of 100, 21 prepared taxes with the help of tax accountant.
2. Say 50 people, uncovered indications of potential tax fraud, 3%(~1.2 say 2 people) used tax consultant.
Conclusion - 48 people (who did not use tax consultant) are more likely to commit tax fraud.

So the conclusion is explicitly talking about people who did not use tax accountant. (Option A, C & E out)
D: If people are not deliberately using accountants to conceal tax fraud, their accounts should not indicate potential tax fraud.

Only B stands. But its difficult to defend B alone.

Hii,
RMD007,
MY APPROACH WAS THE SAME AS YOU HAVE USED HERE?, BUT HOW WE ELIMINATE (D) ,

Sent from my HM 1S using GMAT Club Forum mobile app

I solved this question by POE and got the correct answer in 1 min and 20 secs.

We are given

21% of all tax reports used the assistance of a tax accountant.

Among Fraud Cases: 3% used Tax Accountant.

Conclusion: Without the assistance people are more likely to commit tax fraud.

We need to find the assumption.

A. Citizens who commit tax fraud with the assistance of a tax accountant are less likely to caught by an audit. : How can we say they are less likely to be caught? May be the mechanism is too strong that what it has detected is 100% valid. So, this is INCORRECT.
B. Citizens whose records have indications of potential tax fraud are more likely to commit tax fraud than those whose records do not. Wait, I am not sure what it is saying. I will come on this later
C. Tax accountants will ensure that their clients file taxes that are not fraudulent. No, this is highly abrupt answer choice. Aren't we biased and saying they have selected people because they were not fraud?
D. Some citizens who choose to prepare their taxes without the assistance of a account do so in order to conceal tax fraud. : Is it really so? So, we are saying people are not selecting accountants because they want to be biased. INCORRECT. We cannot run on our own assumptions. This means we are rejecting the Facts.
E. Citizens who prepare their taxes with the assistance of an accountant do so in order to avoid accidentally committing tax fraud. Again, an Invalid case. We cannot assume this on our own to straighten the point that the survey is biased and people have done this intentionally.

Ok, now we are left with only B, it MUST be the answer.

Let me know in case of any confusion.

Hi Lets use negation

Stimulus says that more instances (as a percentage) of potential tax frauds translates to greater tendency for committing fraud. Now the gap is between "potential fraud indications" and actual fraud, which option B bridges.

A. Citizens who commit tax fraud with the assistance of a tax accountant are less likely to caught by an audit. - This is just the opposite of the required assumption. If this were true then, it would imply that citizens who use accountants also commit fraud (but they are not caught)
B. Citizens whose records have indications of potential tax fraud are more likely to commit tax fraud than those whose records do not. - explained
C. Tax accountants will ensure that their clients file taxes that are not fraudulent. - This is not a required assumption. If this is not true, even then the argument holds. What if the citizens who use accountants ensure that they don't commit fraud, not the accountants.
D. Some citizens who choose to prepare their taxes without the assistance of a account do so in order to conceal tax fraud. - This is not a required assumption. What if they choose not to involve an accountant because of some other reason, lets say their don't want to spend extra bucks. That doesn't affect their tendency to commit fraud.
E. Citizens who prepare their taxes with the assistance of an accountant do so in order to avoid accidentally committing tax fraud. - Similar reasoning as in option D

[quote="godot53"]A study this year found that, among citizens of Patria whose tax reports were selected at random for an audit, 21% had prepared their taxes with the assistance of a tax accountant. However, among those whose audits uncovered indications of potential tax fraud, only 3% had prepared their taxes with the assistance of a tax accountant. Clearly, citizens of Patria who prepare their taxes without the assistance of a tax accountant are more likely to commit tax fraud.

The conclusion drawn above depends on which of the following assumptions?

A. Citizens who commit tax fraud with the assistance of a tax accountant are less likely to caught by an audit.
B. Citizens whose records have indications of potential tax fraud are more likely to commit tax fraud than those whose records do not.
C. Tax accountants will ensure that their clients file taxes that are not fraudulent.
D. Some citizens who choose to prepare their taxes without the assistance of a account do so in order to conceal tax fraud.
E. Citizens who prepare their taxes with the assistance of an accountant do so in order to avoid accidentally committing tax fraud.

A study this year found that, among citizens of Patria whose tax reports were selected at random for an audit, 21% had prepared their taxes with the assistance of a tax accountant. However, among those whose audits uncovered indications of potential tax fraud, only 3% had prepared their taxes with the assistance of a tax accountant. Clearly, citizens of Patria who prepare their taxes without the assistance of a tax accountant are more likely to commit tax fraud.
Understand :
1) 100 citizs of P : 21 audited with auditor
2) assune (X) of 100 citizs = potential fraud
3)3% of (X) = potential fraud + auditor

cocmslusion : No auditor = tax fruad

Reasoning: There is a COMPARISON between people with auditors and ppl without. Now the authorjust tells us that 3% used auditirs but did the rest of (x) use audtors? if they did then the conclusion { no auditor= tax fraud } does not hold becuase in botn the cases with or wothiut the auditor tax fraud is still there. thats it.

{ Note : There are few main types of GMAT CR PATTERNS on which GMAT PLAYS
1) logical gap : premise is about A . concusion is about B. >>> assumption A and B are linked
2) Comparison : data about two or three groups . Conslusion about 1 group. >> Always think about other groups which are not in conclusion. (This is the case here )
3) Generalisation : talks about a part , consludes about whole >> ASSUMPTION - part represnts whole
}

Official Explanation

Reading the question: we're given an argument to pick apart. Term matching is a good candidate for any argument, but especially pseudo-syllogistic arguments such as this one, so we can create our filter by looking for a mismatch of terms:



Creating a filter: the first two rows highlight the same basic point, which is that, if the study has been conducted in a way such that it is not representative of the population of Patria as a whole, then the audit would be questionable. However, we've been told that the citizens selected for the audit were selected "at random," so they are most likely representative of the population. The most basic mismatch is the final one: the term in the conclusion "more likely to commit tax fraud" matches up imprecisely with the concept in the evidence "indications of potential tax fraud." For example, maybe it's typical to demonstrate indications of tax fraud and not commit fraud; maybe the indications are poor predictors overall of whether these people are actually committing the tax fraud more. There's our filter.

Applying the filter: we look for an answer choice that expresses this connection and find (B).

Logical proof: we can use the negation test to see whether (B) is critical to the argument. What if citizens whose records have indications of potential tax fraud are not at all more likely to commit tax fraud? Indeed, then the argument collapses, the higher incidence of these indications then would not constitute evidence of a higher rate of tax fraud in any group.

The correct answer is (B).

The conclusion is pretty straightforward- Citizens who prepare taxes on their own are more like to have committed fraud.
But the argument identifies those individuals to have a potential tax fraud. By negating B- If those citizens are not likely to have committed fraud, then conclusion breaks. Hence, B is correct.

nehasomani33 - Could you please help on this?

thinkvision

Assumption should be such that, if it is negated, the conclusion will become invalid.

Here, if we see that the indicators of the fraud are not really very substantive, then it may lead to wrong data result. So in this case, if the indicators of the fraud are not correctly capturing the fraudulent cases, then this 3% data may be incorrect. Also it might lead to an interpretation that fraudulent cases (which were prepared by the accountant) were not really captured, resulting into smaller percent of fraud case (prepared by accountant).

Hope this helps!

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