France Uses AI To Find Swimming Pools For Tax Purposes
from the beep-boop-beep dept
As humanity marches on towards the expansion of artificial intelligence, we are finding many ways to use this technology while waiting for it to get smart enough to kill us all and bring on the Age of the Robot. Platforms have attempted to solve the impossibility of moderation at scale by employing AI, with no real success. The UK tried to employ AI to make decisions for when to charge certain people with crimes based on a likelihood to re-offend… largely based on where they live. And, of course, there are those that have used AI to create intellectual property in order to throw the IP world into chaos over whether AI can claim IP rights or not.
But in France, it’s swimming pools and taxes. Confused? Well, the French government has employed AI to search through satellite imagery in order to find un-reported swimming pools at residences in order to properly tax owners according to French property tax laws.
Using an artificial intelligence computer vision system developed by French IT firm Capgemini, the French tax office (often called “Le Fisc“) has identified 20,356 residential swimming pools that had previously gone undeclared. According to The Guardian, this has opened up 10 million euros in additional tax revenue, leading the way to the government taxing other undeclared architectural features such as annexes or verandas.
The pilot for this program did not go off without issue. At first, the AI software couldn’t distinguish “blue rectangles” representing swimming pools and similar objects that were actually things like solar panels. But with some fine-tuning, Le Fisc got the error rate on the software far below the 30% it was originally returning.
If you’re confused as to why any of this is a thing, it’s because French real estate taxes are assessed based on their rental values rather than property purchasing values. Swimming pools ramp up the rent value on any property. How much? Well, enough that the French government expects to collect roughly 40 million euros as a result of this programming spanning out to all of France.
Is this a good use of AI? I mean, nobody likes being taxed, but it would seem that searching for property owners failing to acknowledge their tax obligations isn’t the world’s worst thing.
Filed Under: ai, france, surveillance, swimming pools, tax cheats
Comments on “France Uses AI To Find Swimming Pools For Tax Purposes”
Obviously any “swimming pool” should be manually checked, because there will be false positives no matter what.
Then again, this is France, and they might be incompetent enough to automate the whole thing.
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The hits by the program are checked by humans. The use of a ML program is to plow through the aerial photos of the whole of the department they tested this in in a reasonable time frame.
If you want to keep as much of your earnings as possible, you’re a greedy bastard.
If a government bureaucrat wants to extract every last cent out of your wallet, they’re noble and pure.
Re: Do you even want to pay taxes at all?
Those poor, starving upper-middle class and millionaires struggle to feed their families because the government is cracking down on their tax evasion.
Now, I get that there are places with taxes which really are too high, especially for lower-class households. But some taxes are necessary, and some governments would do well to lower taxes on the poor, raise taxes on the millionaires, and allocate sufficient budget funds toward tax enforcement. (That second part seems impossible to comprehend for many in the US.) I hope you’re not the kind who wants to lower taxes on even the most wealthy and or entirely opposes the idea of taxes. I also hope you’re not the kind who complains about too much government spending, insists on lowering taxes all the time, and then complains about the president more than about the legislature when a recession due to inflation happens.
“X party loves government they can’t pay for.”
“Let’s raise taxes on the most wealthy to pay for it.”
“No, not like that!”
And if I had to guess, people with pools and the guts to avoid paying taxes for them will tend to be able to pay their taxes and still have enough profit for an enjoyable life. It’s easy to complain when the government fails and easy to miss when government does its job properly. The benefits of government are invisible and constant. Wanting the benefits without the taxes would be wanting to eat the cake and to still have it. You can worry less about your food, your water, you electricity, your clothing, your roads, and your house’s risk of fire as long as the government gets enough taxes and spends enough on regulating such things. “From AM to PM, the fickle force of government is with you“.
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If a rich person has a pool, it is so unfair that they have to pay a tax on pools. Especially if they are more equal than other lesser people with pools.
If you don’t like the tax, then participate in the government process. If you are rich you already have a louder voice than other people who are inferior to yourself (eg, not rich).
It seems fair to me for the government to use AI to locate swimming pools for this porpoise.
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If you want to engage in tax fraud to enrich yourself at the cost of the rest of society, you’re a greedy bastard.
FTFY
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If you’re rich and want to keep as much of your earnings as possible, you’re a greedy bastard and guess what? You probably do tax evasion and you are a horrible person.
If a government bureaucrat wants to extract every last cent out of your wallet, they’re corrupt bastards and should be voted out if possible. They’re most likely not competent enough to actually be there, too.
HOWEVER, if a government bureaucrat just wants you to pay your fair share so that everyone, INCLUDING YOU, can continue to be safe, have proper roads and whatnot, that’s not greed or corruption, it’s the base essentials of keeping a country running, dipshit.
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“If you want to keep as much of your earnings as possible, you’re a greedy bastard.”
When part of the contract that enabled you to earn so much money was that you’d be taxed on part of it? Yes.
“If a government bureaucrat wants to extract every last cent out of your wallet, they’re noble and pure.”
If the rules are that you pay tax, and they are simply upholding the law that states that tax is owed, yes. You deciding that laws don’t apply to you because you’d rather not pay your end of the bargain made when you acquired property is not. If you disagree with the law and want it changed, that’s fair enough, but that doesn’t make the people tasked with gathering tax revenue evil just because your attempts to hide taxable assets didn’t work out.
Something similar was done in Greece in 2010:
Of course, this could just lead to an arms race. Ever seen those movies where the terrorists are tracking satellite orbits, and they pull tarps over the weapons when the thing’s about to pass by? Same thing, except you’re rushing your kids out of the pool to pull the solar blanket over it.
There have been great advances in multi-scale camouflage over the last decades too, and there’s always the low-tech solution of covering the pool with a tent (avoiding the “high-tech” humidity management needed for an indoor pool).
Taxing verandas might be a step too far. We can still see the results of England’s window tax, and it was repealed 171 years ago.
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I have relatives down on the Alabama coast. They have a pool in their back yard (actually, its almost all of their back yard) and it’s completely screened in. 20ft side screens, and then a across the top, REduces the risk of sunburn a little, but very little flying insect worry. Make the top one’s holes a little smaller, and print on top, and you could have a cammo net effectively.
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Then, the question becomes – at what point does buying a bunch of equipment and running around trying to hide things because more expensive and less viable than just paying the tax? At what point are you costing yourself more than you would if you weren’t trying to evade taxes?
“We can still see the results of England’s window tax”
Which merely suggests that there’s a reason why people haven’t bothered to add windows in the nearly 2 centuries since the law was repealed.
“No, your drone fucked up. There’s a large solar panel in my back garden, not a swimming pool, and if you can’t be botherex to come round and see for yourself, you’ll just have to take my word for it.”
Seriously, though. Rental value is the stupidest basis for property taxes. I mean, just because a property could potentially be rented out, that’s no guarantee that it will be, so such a tax has to be hitting some homeowners quite hard.
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You do realize one of the reasons that they are using satellites is due to the fact that evaluators can only access a property with permission of the owner.
So a whole cottage industry of strategic landscaping has arisen just to prevent said evaluators from eyeballing the backyard. It doesn’t help that despite best efforts of the EU and France to make cash go poof most builders will happily take cash to build a ‘pergola with a deep foundation’ or something similar that they pretend isn’t a pool.
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You clearly don’t realize that the potential value of a property is a bad basis to tax it on and actual value is more equitable, just as Autie implied.
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This seems particularly bad for families. It’s common to install pools for one’s children, and kids are infamous freeloaders even when their parents are rich. Little chance of getting rent from them. Meanwhile, anyone who’s owned a pool knows that the pool itself is a tax. Daily chemical treatments and cleaning, pump/filter maintenance, possibly heating bills, emptying for the winter and re-buying that water next year. Inground pools need their liners replaced every 20-30 years, and it’s even expensive to replace a pool with dirt, which means they have little positive effect on a home’s retail value.
Of course, everything’s great from the point-of-view of an actual renter who can just swim and not deal with any of this shit. Depending on the details of rent control, it might not even be possible for their landlord to pass on any increases in taxes or costs, nor remove an amenity without decreasing rent.
I wonder whether governments could collect money more easily by increasing the VAT rate on pools and related services. Rich people aren’t gonna do the work themselves, and it’s easier to go after hundreds of companies than tens of thousands of homeowners.
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Those who are wealthy enough to have a private swimming pool, yes.
Anyone who cannot afford the taxes and upkeep shouldn’t have a pool. It’s quite simple.
How many French homes with pools are subject to rent control?
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I don’t know about France, but pools are not typically considered the domain of the wealthy in Canada. Large and fancy inground pools, yes, and definitely indoor pools; but aboveground pools are considered middle-class if not a bit trashy. And we’re already hearing complaints that swimming skills are declining and lifeguards are hard to hire (which is causing public pools to shut down), so it may not be good long-term public policy to discourage pools.
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This is a good point. Presumably rental value would change based on whether it’s an in ground or above ground pool, and I doubt the machine learning program can tell the difference.
Though this isn’t a pool tax, it’s just a property value tax, calculated in a weird way.
It's art...
Wait for the pool liner with a lawn print or alternate colors. “It’s not tax evasion, it’s art.” Vive la France!
Green paint
I foresee a new fashion for green paint or green tiles sweeping across France.
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Or large marquees for wedding receptions that never seem to actually take place.
That thing in WWII where they had inflatable tanks, planes & other things to confuse the spy planes…
How soon until there is netting to make the home look like a shack from the air but on the ground its really Versailles?
And…
Yet another reason for indoor basement pool conversions.
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I dare say that if you own a property large enough to be able to do such a thing then you probably earn enough just to pay the tax on a standard build, probably more cheaply than the cost of a building conversion. But, each to their own, if you feel you get more value from the time, money and effort involved in tax evasion, go for it.
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It was a backhanded joke.
inground swimming pools are better for the environment than fill and drain. Way to tax the green method. 🤦♂️
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