You can not stop progress ! The Tax Office is adopting a new system using artificial intelligence to ferret out fraudsters.
Would it be impossible to avoid taxes? The Tax Office is equipping itself with a new tool to monitor and catch fraudsters. After using social networks, the French tax authorities are now using artificial intelligence. In addition to social assistance fraud, the State wants to take control of swimming pool owners. Since the implementation of this system called “Innovative Land” in 2021, the DGFP has been able to identify thousands of fraudsters, owners of undeclared swimming pools.
Hidden swimming pools: be careful, the Tax Office sees everything!
A new tool deployed
The tax authorities are arming themselves to get their hands on the fraudsters. From now on, it is using Artificial Intelligence that the tax authorities carry out more in-depth tax controls. Indeed, the “Innovative Land” system allows aerial shots to be taken to verify that the information given by owners is consistent with reality.
“This is a project allowing the tax administration to use innovative artificial intelligence technologies to automate the use of aerial shots and all the data collected by the tax administration”details the site Impots.gouv.
How does it work ?
The algorithms, developed in open source, allow, on the basis of public aerial images from the National Institute of Geographic and Forestry Information (IGN) available to all on its website (www.geoportail.gouv.fr), to extract the contours of built buildings as well as swimming pools. Computer processing then identifies, based in particular on the declarations of owners made to the town planning and tax administration services, whether the elements thus detected in the images are correctly imposed on local direct taxes (property tax in particular).
Finally, a tax administration agent systematically checks each potential anomaly detected before any recovery operation of the owner of the property, then leading to taxation when the anomaly is proven.
Tax fraud: thousands of swimming pools discovered by the tax authorities using AI
Millions of undeclared swimming pools
According to the report from the General Directorate of Public Finances, the tax authorities were able to identify nearly 140,000 undeclared swimming pools, during the year 2023, indicate our colleagues from West France. In 2022, 20,000 undeclared swimming pools were discovered by the “Innovative Land” system. A real shortfall in state coffers, especially when we know that swimming pool owners must pay a development tax which varies depending on the surface area of the swimming pool. An increase in property tax and housing tax, under certain conditions, is also to be expected since the installation of a swimming pool increases the cadastral rental value.
In 2023, the shortfall for local authorities (which collect and choose the rate of this tax) is 40 million euros in property tax.
These departments which interest the tax authorities the most
As reported CNews, before the launch of this revolutionary AI-based tool, there was first a testing phase. Some French departments have attracted the attention of the tax service, more than others. “A first trial of this type was carried out in 2019, in Charente-Maritime, in Drôme and in the Alpes-Maritimes, and made it possible to discover 3,000 undeclared swimming pools”we read in the columns of the information site.
In order to ensure the effectiveness of the system, an experiment was carried out in 2022 in 9 departments (Alpes-Maritimes, Var, Bouches-du-Rhône, Ardèche, Rhône, Haute-Savoie, Morbihan, Maine-et-Loire , Vendée) in order to detect non-taxed swimming pools.
