French Government Uses AI To Spot Undeclared Swimming Pools - and Tax Them (theverge.com) 126
The French government has collected nearly $10 million in additional taxes after using machine learning to spot undeclared swimming pools in aerial photos. In France, housing taxes are calculated based on a property's rental value, so homeowners who don't declare swimming pools are potentially avoiding hundreds of euros in additional payments. From a report: The project to spot the undeclared pools began last October, with IT firm Capgemini working with Google to analyze publicly available aerial photos taken by France's National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information. Software was developed to identify pools, with this information then cross-referenced with national tax and property registries. The project is somewhat limited in scope, and has so far analyzed photos covering only nine of France's 96 metropolitan departments. But even in these areas, officials discovered 20,356 undeclared pools, according to an announcement this week from France's tax office, the General Directorate of Public Finance (DGFiP), first reported by Le Parisien.
Sacre bleu! (Score:2)
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But then, how many (gold) fish ponds show up blue?
(That's assuming the AI looks for blue spots)
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Are goldfish ponds normally swimming pool sized? I don't believe the French are going after wading pools you put out in the summer for the kids, but regular swimming pools of the kind that require chlorine and stuff to maintain.
It's also my understanding that goldfixh generally scale to the size of the water body they're in so you can see some gigantic goldfish because they happen to have space to grow.
And finally, well, if push comes to shove, I'm sure you
Athens, Greece was doing this 11 years ago (Score:4, Informative)
From https://www.thestar.com/news/w... [thestar.com]
"The flyover, in conjunction with satellite imagery, produced a shocking aqua-census: 16,974 pools tucked behind high property walls. Yet only 324 households in those areas had ticked the box on their income tax forms admitting to pool ownership."
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Athens, Greece was doing this *manually* 11 years ago. The news here is that its automated. Lots of cities around the world already did it manually.
Seems like.... (Score:4, Interesting)
it might be time to invest in a camo pool cover to blend in with the surrounding terrain?
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Yeah, and then only swim at night when the cameras can't see it....
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Re:Seems like.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or just not illegally attempt to doge taxes. But hey getting modded up for making illegal suggestions for tax evasion seems to be the new "in" thing on Slashdot I suppose.
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In France, tax evasion is one of their less well-known national sports. Everybody cheats on their taxes, unless the over-worked tax auditors catch them at it. Then, they pay a fine and whatever back taxes the government can squeeze out of them and go back to cheating, although with a different scheme so that they don't get caught too soon.
Tax on fun (Score:2)
So if you have a hot girlfriend/wife you should be taxed on that?
go camo (Score:2)
Tax on Bathing (Score:2)
Way to work on improving that reputation, Frenchie.
All that for $10m? (Score:2)
Tax authorities could collect $10m in taxes by just spending a few grand (likely less than this AI model cost to develop) in labor to audit basically any one person with 9+ digits of wealth.
Farmers (Score:2)
I cannot wait for them to extend this to the rural agricultural areas and start telling farmers that the manure pit behind their house increases their theoretical rental value.
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Having a pool effects the value of the house/property. The higher the value the more property taxes are paid. Slashdot loves higher taxes so I don't really see what the problem is.
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Re:Government Overreach (Score:5, Funny)
Cheech & Chong did it first.
https://youtu.be/7WJQuE5yObQ [youtu.be]
Wait a minute ...
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But they were pretending a pool where there really was a weed plantation...
Re: Government Overreach (Score:4, Funny)
But these days weed has been decriminalized in many places, at least in small quantities. So we are almost to the point where it would make sense to have a fake weed plantation to hide your swimming pool.
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Re:Government Overreach (Score:4, Interesting)
Having a pool effects the value of the house/property.
Pools are weird. Some people consider them a plus, enhancing the home value. Others consider them a negative and will offer less for a home with a pool. Pools come with maintenance an safety issues that not everyone wants to deal with. Plus, in some areas (like mine), some people object to the water usage of pools.
That means you can't say in any absolute sense what the "rental value" of a property is. Probably more precise is the "maximum rental value", that is, the most one could reasonably expect to rent a property for. But there lies the rub: there are a lot of things which affect the possible rent of a building. If it's been recently renovated, something you're not going to tell from a satellite photo, the rental value will be higher. I wonder how they deal with this.
Re: Government Overreach (Score:2)
That's not weird. That's true of most house features. Ethernet drops for example. Or a garage. Or gutters.
When you sell a house, you sell it to someone who wants it. You don't sell it to people who want a completely different house.
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Ethernet drops may not add value to some people, but they are unlike to detract value from anyone. Same for garage or gutters. Pools come with significant maintenance, increased insurance and utility costs. They quite literally can bring down the value of a home.
Re: Government Overreach (Score:2)
The fact that an ethernet drop usually takes out a plug outlet can definitely turn people off.
Re: Government Overreach (Score:2)
Pools have zero maintenance costs if you don't fill them. Your argument does not make sense.
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Re: Government Overreach (Score:2)
Pools are completely free of all maintenance if you never fill them. So your argument is silly.
Just like ethernet drops taking up plug space, if you don't use it, it's worthless, but doesn't cost you anything to have.
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Well, except that if *some* people think that it enhances the value of a property then that's the high water mark which determines the value of the home/property.
Just like *some* people think that a two car garage, an atrium, a deck, etc enhances the value of a property. Not all of those things will be desirable to everyone based on their circumstances.
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"Well, except that if *some* people think that it enhances the value of a property then that's the high water mark which determines the value of the home/property."
He's it's the government and it thinks EVERYTHING raises the value of the property.
From 2023 on, nobody will have to pay the taxe-d'habitation for their primary residence anyway.
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Where I grew up, a pool of the sort that is dug into the ground was definitely a sign that you had money to afford it. Those with less money would buy cheaper above ground pools instead. Pools are not cheap.
I found more interesting that the government treats gazebos are an added value, even though a gazebo is very inexpensive to build. At least the wood ones, maybe the French style is different?
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Value and cost are not the same thing. You can do a lot of inexpensive things that increase the value of a house.
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Value and cost are not the same thing. You can do a lot of inexpensive things that increase the value of a house.
Which might be great if you're planning to sell your house. If you're just making the modifications to make your living space nicer for yourself though, it kind of stinks if the modifications increase the the value of the house by a lot more than they cost. It leaves you with the unhappy possibility for situations where, for example (and this is probably pretty extreme, but not impossible), you owe more in taxes on an improvement every year than you spent on it.
Overall, basing evaluations for houses purely
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" Pools come with maintenance an safety issues that not everyone wants to deal with."
According to Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics, approximately 3,536 people drowned each year in pools.
And if it's your drunk neighbor, you'll get sued.
Re:Government Overreach (Score:5, Informative)
Probably not in France.
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According to Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics, approximately 3,536 people drowned each year in pools.
And if it's your drunk neighbor, you'll get sued.
Good argument for a sturdy pool cover and maybe one of those drowning detection systems.
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I would say more that people are different. A bad pool detracts from value. A good pool adds value. What makes a pool good or bad is subjective though.
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Pools are weird.
Pools are something you want your friend to have.
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The most impressive part is that it's not the UK government doing it with some weird pool detecting vans driving all over the city
Re:Cost/Benefit (Score:4, Insightful)
You misunderstood the comment (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, taxing pools is the law over there. But using AI to find dodgers is not.
And that's what the point is about. Accidental justice is not justice, the way you get there is important too. It's no different for taxes.
Like already mentioned, this is hard for Americans to understand, with their Hucksterist culture. You can't run a government on doing whatever the fsck you like for as long as you get away with it, then think of some other stunt to pull. That just doesn't work in Europe, where the government is expected to embody some sort of rechtsstaat. [wikipedia.org]
Over here there's a "information bureau" that gathers data from various government ministries and departments, and redistributes it to other parts of the government. The thing is, they're government-funded, but emphatically not part of the government. This to sidestep the GDPR and local transparency and privacy laws. That is sneaky.
And if you ask them about just what they're doing and how they're doing it and please justify how this fits with the GDPR (for which the onus is, by law, squarely on them), you get no straight answer.
That sort of shit is detrimental to the believability and trustworthyness of the government.
Crowing about how helpful advanced automated tech is to find tax dodgers is good and well, but it opens the door to more and more fully automated checking, and that can easily get positively Orwellian. So they can't just say "lookit us!", if they're going to stick with systems like this they're going to have to talk about and implement checks and balances and means of redress also.
I notice the "-1 disagree" folks are out in force again.
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Yes, taxing pools is the law over there. But using AI to find dodgers is not.
By your reasoning the government should not be allowed to use phone records to prove illegal activity because... phones did not exist when murder, for instance, was made illegal. Same goes for using mobile phone location, using anything the perps published on the internet, checking their car odometer, etc. In other words your reasoning makes no sense.
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It's common knowledge in France, and at least I was told as a kid in the 80s that the tax services will use aerial photographs to spot undeclared pools. The new concept here is that the verification is now using machine learning instead of people looking for patches of blue or basic algorithms.
France taxes separately each element of a house: total area, liveable area, number of floors, pool, sunroom, garage, cellar, basement, fireplace, terrace, garden shed (or hen house). These are elements of PUBLIC knowl
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It sounds like you might be very shocked to find out the lengths the British government would go to in order to find people who weren't paying their TV taxes back in the day. Maybe you thought TEMPEST systems were only for intelligence agencies.
Re:Cost/Benefit (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as it's less than 10 million then it kind of doesn't matter. Considering this is using image data that's already being collected it's probably well south of that.
If French citizens want to change the method at which property taxes are calculated and exclude pools they can elect representatives who share that view.
Enforcing the tax laws on the books, as they are written by the representatives who the people elected to those offices is not "going after" anyone but people who are engaging in tax evasion.
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Enforcing the tax laws on the books, as they are written by the representatives who the people elected to those offices is not "going after" anyone but people who are engaging in tax evasion.
There is an interesting question [stackexchange.com] on the law stack exchange that raises the question of "is this use of satellite data a GDPR violation?". The current (and only) answer suggests that it is possibly not a violation. But of course anything legal is only definitive after someone has challenged it.
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Sure, that is a separate argument though. If the tax office sent a person to every house to inspect for pools that would be essentially be the same result in the end, this is just a way easier method to get that data.
I would agree that it probably is not a GDPR violation to take aerial imagery, not just is it outside the spirit of the law but essentially unenforceable but I imagine an angry pool owner in France will try to get a judges answer on it.
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I agree that it is a separate argument. But it also a potential additional twist that I didn't see coming, and given that the GDPR laws can be far reaching it does set up some potential legal conflict that could result in these additional French tax assessments being deemed invalid or illegal or something. All pure speculation of course.
Re: Cost/Benefit (Score:2)
The GDPR limits the invasion of privacy without reason. But when there is a law on the books that requires the collection of data to be enforced or implemented, that *always* takes precedence.
You can argue that it is an invasion of privacy to collect data on citizens, but the images are already there.
However, there is another EU regulation coming that will be a lot more applicable: the AI regulation. Now *that* will actually have a direct impact on the use of machine learning for this sort of thing and CapG
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It seems likely that it just points out possible violations. Then someone just has to peek over a fence and verify it's a pool and not a visual anomaly. No need to even knock on the door, it's public information.
Re:Cost/Benefit (Score:4, Insightful)
is this use of satellite data a GDPR violation
I find it impossible to consider this a GDPR violation as the resolution of satellite data does not identify anyone nor is it in relation to data about them. The use of council zoning plans for street addresses may *may* be subject to some kind of GDPR related oversight but even then that's a stretch since again the data isn't in any way tied to someone personal or private information.
This is about as silly as me looking at your car is a GDPR violation, better still even when I can't see the license plate.
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I would agree, or rather, if the tax code is so complicated that a large majority of people are able to avoid it easily we should adapt the tax code to increase compliance, or eliminate that particular tax and increase another easier to collect tax.
In principle I fully though taxes should be enforced fairly and evenly across the income spectrum.
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A poster below sourced it to $24M but noted it's going to have a 5 year ROI since they can already recoup $4.1M per year in taxes. Grain of salt but he had some numbers.
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How much did it cost in development and consulting fees to find reasons to extract this ten million from the French people?
Probably less than 10m and that 10m will be added too as the programme is rolled out and as new houses and pools are built.
Nevermind the cost of not merely signalling to the people to not dodge taxes, but moreover signalling to the people that the French government will stoop to anything and stop at nothing to shake down the people for taxes.
"Stoop"? What do you mean? Do you think that when the police arrest a subject that they should just let them go if they deny the crime? That investigating law-breaking is "stooping"?
This is a bit hard for Americans to understand, but in Europe you can't really live without trusting the government to some degree, and a degree rather a lot more than required in Hucksterist America. So there is a definite cost to the government showing itself sneaky and willing to use any means at its disposal to go after its own citizens.
Yeah, the citizens avoiding tax. Fuck 'em.
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How much did it cost in development and consulting fees to find reasons to extract this ten million from the French people?
The cost is reported to be €24 million. Of the €10 million of taxes, a bit under €6 million is for back taxes and €4.1 million are for recurring yearly taxes. So the return on investment is under 5 years (that's not counting people who will try to avoid the fines by preemptively coming forth).
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but moreover signalling to the people that the French government will stoop to anything and stop at nothing to shake down the people for taxes.
Identifying actual tax evaders not following the law is not a "shake down". Please use words correctly.
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So there is a definite cost to the government showing itself sneaky and willing to use any means at its disposal to go after its own citizens.
Not paying your taxes is robbing the government of its property. In most jurisdictions, tax fraud is a crime. Isn't it the responsibility of the government to catch criminals?
Would we not be happy to find new ways for the government to catch killers, rapist, or people dumping illegally toxic waste near water sources?
Financial crimes are crimes too!
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Either way property taxes suck
Agree on this, and if anyone else does it's never too late to board the Land Value Tax train. [wikipedia.org]
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Either way property taxes suck. They're regressive.
Why do you say that?
Re:Weird, in the US having a pool tanks your value (Score:4, Insightful)
They can be regressive because they do not take into account the income of the person paying. A person making 20k and another making 50k living in identical properties in the same area will pay the same in tax on those properties. That is not a judgement of good or bad or fairness but by definition that is regressive.
The Philadelphia Fed also put it in a more detailed way in a paper: [syr.edu]
Among single-family homes that enjoy the same set of property tax-funded amenities and pay the same statutory property tax rate, owners of cheap houses pay almost 50% higher effective tax rates than owners of expensive houses. This pattern appears throughout the United States and is caused by systematic assessment regressivity – cheap houses are over-assessed relative to expensive houses. I use an instrumental variable approach to show that a large portion of this pattern can be attributed to measurement error in sale prices. Sixty percent of the remaining regressivity can be explained by tax assessors’ flawed valuation methods that ignore variation in priced house and neighborhood characteristics and 40% by infrequent reappraisal. A simple valuation method can alleviate assessment regressivity and increase poor homeowners’ net worth by more than 10%.
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Dear Philadelphia Fed: The explanation is because the land (that people want to live on) is expensive. Expensive land + cheap house = high property taxes. Expensive land + expensive house = slightly higher property taxes.
Re: Weird, in the US having a pool tanks your valu (Score:2)
Perhaps, but they are calculated by property values (in most places) which is a good proxy for income.
Re: Weird, in the US having a pool tanks your valu (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Weird, in the US having a pool tanks your val (Score:2)
If you move into a gentrifying area, then stay as long as you can, then sell at a profit. That's a path out of poverty.
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They can be regressive because they do not take into account the income of the person paying. A person making 20k and another making 50k living in identical properties in the same area will pay the same in tax on those properties.
They may be regressive by definition but are not typically regressive in application as a person making 20k and another making more than double that quite rarely live in the same kind of house. Sure, they do in some cases, but largely poor people live in poor areas of lower land value and in smaller / worse condition houses subject to lower net tax payments. That's kind of the in the definition of being poor. And visa versa.
No one making 20k a year is being hounded to pay swimming pool taxes.
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They may be regressive by definition but are not typically regressive in application as a person making 20k and another making more than double that quite rarely live in the same kind of house.
They are regressive because the amount of property tax you pay does not scale equally with your income. If you make $100,000 per year, you almost certainly pay less property tax as a percentage of your income as someone making $40k. You are either paying that property tax directly as a homeowner or indirectly as a renter. This makes it regressive both in definition and application.
property taxes do not have to be regressive (Score:2)
Property taxes are not naturally regressive. Property taxes do not HAVE to be a flat rate.
You could imagine a property tax rate that depends on property value in the same way the income tax are set.
You could set property tax so that the maximum rate depends on your income.
For a while (and maybe still now), property tax in France were waived for people making less than some amount per year.
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Property taxes are not naturally regressive. Property taxes do not HAVE to be a flat rate.
You could imagine a property tax rate that depends on property value in the same way the income tax are set.
The challenge in the US is that property tax mostly goes towards paying for local government. Most of it goes to schools. If the average home value in your district is $300k, and a neighbor district has an average home value of $600k, it is doubtful they are spending double per student. You may be spending $1500 per year on local schools (0.5%), while your neighbor is spending $2000 per year (0.33%). This is one example of what makes property tax regressive, in the US at least.
If you cap the tax rate on the
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Yeah! school funding in the US is made so that poor district get bad education while rich districts get good education. Once you realize that the school district are lined up of red lined district, you start getting a sense of why some people say that the system is racist.
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Yeah I'm not disagreeing with that but property tax by it's nature is regressive, that's just a true statement, it's not an argument in favor or against it as a tax or policy.
Personally I much prefer a Land Value Tax as opposed to property taxes since it seems to correct a lot of the downsides of property taxes.
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I pay both land value tax and property tax (improvements). One parcel is only $80/year for land value tax. The other parcel has about $9K/year tax for just the improvements, plus a small amount for land value tax ($280). If I were retired or otherwise on a fixed income the regressive nature would be problematic, I'd owe a increasing amounts of money each year without my income keeping up. California is going to be really sad when techies leave the state for retirement, because they'll take their tax-shelte
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Renting costs are far more than what you would pay in taxes on a home (we're talking the average house, not mansions). Depending on where you live, a few months of (3-4) of rent payments would equal your tax bill, leaving all the other unpaid rent to go into your pocket.
If anything, renting decreases your ability to generate wealth and savings.
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So form an LLC, sell your house to it, and rent to yourself. This can be problematic though, you might have to pay taxes. It allegedly works better if you form the LLC and have it buy the house instead of you in the first place...
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You lose some tax benefits with your scheme, you can't cut your interest payments out of your income when you don't have a mortgage on your primary residence. Also you'll find that you'll need to have a bigger down payment as a new LLC than as an individual, the interest rates they offer will be worse, and they'll be more interested in your occupancy arrangement. It can be problematic legally to pay your own LLC for rent, it can potentially disqualify you from being protected from financial liability.
Instea
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Mortgage complicates that further in most areas. Taxes plus mortgage is out of reach for many renters, which explains the reason why they are renting and not owning. I happen to live in an area where median rent is less than taxes and mortgage for a median home. While technically the principle is yours and long-term you often pay a lot less than rent for interest plus taxes, it's still out of budget for many people. In my area it has been at various points in history break even for interest+mortgage versus
Re: Weird, in the US having a pool tanks your valu (Score:2)
Taxes are how limited common resources are managed by civil society. If there were no property taxes, all the land would be owned by the Rockefellers or some similar. The taxes are there to ensure you're making productive use of the land and not just buying it to sit on it.
There are a few countries that have no property taxes. Mostly these are petro states where the commonly held limited resource is oil rather than land like it is everywhere else.
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size seems like an easy thing to estimate from images. whatever the French law is, it probably treats small above ground pools differently than large in ground pools. And the best thing about AI and expert systems is you can use them to organize your human staff on where to focus audits and inspections. You can even ignore the individual pool itself and focus on neighborhoods with a high percentage of scofflaws. Who knows what else might be discovered once a tax man starts poking around.
demand source code in court! if not then aquit! (Score:2)
demand source code in court! if not then you must you must Acquit!
Do they have some on the ground that can make an hands on check?
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If you read the article then yes. The AI is used to spot the pools, then an actual human goes out to double-check it really is a pool.
They should do something about the dodged taxes too. I would say something along the lines of ten years of back taxes plus interest unless you can prove the pool was constructed more recently, plus a fine of a year's taxes for tax dodging.
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You don't have to pay taxes in America. Like you said yourself, go live in a shack in Montana with an agreement on someone's property, don't earn any meaningful income and don't interact with the greater consumer retail areas of the US and you will pay $0 in taxes.
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Property taxes are theft.
It's called a 'tax' but it's actually you paying rent to the real property owner. Don't believe me? Stop paying the tax/rent and see how fast you get evicted.
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Then don't own property, bingo, zero property taxes.
if property tax is theft than so is rent and being a landlord should be outlawed right?
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Property taxes are theft.
It's called a 'tax' but it's actually you paying rent to the real property owner. Don't believe me? Stop paying the tax/rent and see how fast you get evicted.
I own my property and the home on it. I pay property taxes every year. By your logic I am simply shifting money from one pocket to the other.
The paperwork for my property and home state that I own it free and clear. So I am considered to be the owner, in the eyes of the laws of my country, not the State or County or whatever.
When I examine my checking account I see that this tax payment does not go from one of my pockets to another pocket of mine (a reasonable & logical extension of your statement) beca
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Please don't ever post on the internet again. It was built with taxes which you declare are the result of a crime. Stop supporting criminals.
Re:Taxation is theft (Score:5, Insightful)
Taxation is theft
No, taxation is merely the cost of living in society.
Insisting on your rights while rejecting your responsibilities is juvenile.
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Down to 109.58% [commodity.com]. Good for them, I guess.
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You spend all those years paying off your mortgage and when the property is finally yours you still have to continue paying property tax in order to keep it.
So if you are part of the low or middle class you have to continue working and, more importantly, fearing losing your job.
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There are fairer tax systems, but all comes with a different compromise. Somebody will be affected badly, and they will complain, a lot. Take out property tax, you need to put something else in.
That is why we still keep ancient subsidies for corn, fossil fuels, and whatnot. Even if the society as a whole will benefit from a better system, some people will be negatively affected. They since their individual losses are more than the average benefits of everyone else, they would speak up, very loudly.
Say we ag
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> Take out property tax, you need to put something else in.
The only fair way is to assess a tax that everybody can afford to pay, per human, and then scale government to spend only that.
"But big government unfairly benefits the rich!" they screech.
Yeah.
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I hope I never get as much government as the yearly federal budget (including deficits) indicates could be available to me...
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Re: Property tax needs to be ABOLISHED (Score:2)
Land is a limited resource. It needs to be managed as common property. You can't own land unless you field an army to defend it.
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Europe is about to have a winter with rolling blackouts and they're worried about bleeding citizens for swimming pools.
I never understood this line of reasoning. The government is not just one guy. It's tens of thousands of people. They are working on solving/administering different problems in their domain of expertise. And they form long term plans to address the needs.
They can look at two problems at the same time. It's not like they all wait for a problem to show up. And then they all start working on that same one problem.