French tax officials use AI to spot 20k undeclared pools (2022)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Or wait, imagine if the AI were finding all the rivers and lakes that corporations are dumping trash, chemicals, and other waste products into!
Right? Right? Surely they'd do that with this great technology!
You seem cynical.
Or taxes. Taxes are done exactly the opposite of 'perfectly well'.
Well you need tax payer money to finance the AI that find potential infrastructure problems... So an AI that find tax avoiders might bring more tax payer money to fix other problems.
You mean like the tax-payer money paid at the pump which was sold as a way to finance the maintenance and fix of potential infrastructure problems?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-gas-taxs-tortured-...
It would be amazing when the planning dept just has you upload a BIM an an AI not only devours the BIM model -- but this is how we are going to get to the sci-fi version of "Pull up a blueprint of downtown and show me all the air-ducts where John McClain is hiding!" and "There is a door on your left"
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But the rivers and lakes thing should be readily doable right now - based on media reports of spills - then geo locating them on a map, then pulling in studies based on toxicity and soluability of stated chemicals in the spills - then pull the environmental reports from planning agencies for 'environmental impact reports' which would have a composition of the soil, then compare the chemical lliterature to its permeability to the soil conditions in the area, with the water precipitation records - and you can see where a chemical is going to leech - and what waterways it will affect... and the environmental impact report will tell you all the critters that live in that type of habitat... and if the chemical is egregeous to amphibians, and that marsh is home to a lot of frogs....
you get the idea - but this could be done right now with autoGPT with some effort...
(I cant get autoGPT to write out files though - even though I can get it to do the work... What I think Ill do is have it write python scripts for me to scrape the data I need? Any thoughts on some approches? There is historical data trapped in ChatGPT till 2021 that can be useful for the framework, and then auto GPT to get some current data to populate with?
Or is there a tool that I should be using?
Is there a GIS-AI tool somewhere I can use?
Of course, this not only has privacy issues but also one of social justice. Illegal employment, or what is called "sort arbejde" in Danish or Schwarzarbeit in German if want a compounded word, allows builders en masse to make a decent wage and is widespread, in Denmark at least.
Just think of traffic cops on the highway in the US. If you have big tits and a pretty smile you get off with a warning, but if you're black with resting bitch face then you'll get a ticket or maybe even some K9 action
Either enforce laws or get rid of the laws. If you don't have a system to track swimming pools then don't tax swimming pools.
In the worse dystopian case (see Russia and a lot of the third world) the endless unenforced laws become a means for the govt to harass people they don't like
You’ll be happy to learn that France has moved in the direction to comply with your concern here.
1) There's a 4-5% mistake rate
2) getting a wrong conclusion of the AI turned back is a 2-year kafkaieske nightmare where you have to front all the money, and even after they admit they're wrong it takes 5 years to get your money back. And then next year you get another tax bill for the nonexistent pool and we start from scratch?
Oh and there's the surprisingly little known fact that French citizens torched most of the cars and half of the government departments, including Police stations, in Paris (and Marseille, and Lille, and Toulouse, and ...) on a regular basis for 5 years now. And I bet the recent pension reform is going to make that worse, not better.
Government employees physically inspecting anything will result in large scale battles with the public these days. So I would like to add: they won't physically inspect these pools for the simple reason that nobody wants to get killed working for the tax agency in France, and that's exactly what will happen if they go out and physically check.
The reputation of the French tax office is that it is the sole branch of the administration which is actually run correctly. This is not far from the truth imho.
> Oh and there's the surprisingly little known fact that French citizens torched most of the cars and half of the government departments, including Police stations, in Paris (and Marseille, and Lille, and Toulouse, and ...) on a regular basis for 5 years now.
That’s a funny one. My advise is to stop watching Fox News and actually spend some time in France.
They don’t need to go there physically. They just need to review satellite pictures, do some background work, and send letters. The point is, the AI surfaces dubious cases but in the end it’s a human making the decision.
> The reputation of the tax office is that the tiniest of inconveniences is more than enough to prevent them from doing something.
That might be the reputation amongst people who’ve never been audited. They might be too lenient by default, but they will bite you if they have to.
> Oh and there's the surprisingly little known fact that French citizens torched most of the cars and half of the government departments, including Police stations, in Paris (and Marseille, and Lille, and Toulouse, and ...) on a regular basis for 5 years now. And I bet the recent pension reform is going to make that worse, not better.
It’s difficult to see exactly what you are trying to say here. Maybe try in French, with some sources?
> So I would like to add: they won't physically inspect these pools for the simple reason that nobody wants to get killed working for the tax agency in France, and that's exactly what will happen if they go out and physically check.
You are out of your bloody mind. They already do audits in person and they will come and check if they suspect some of your declarations are not truthful. Nobody will kill a taxman over something like that. I mean, now you’ve killed a civil servant to avoid paying taxes you should have paid, so you are going to jail, pay a fine, and still pay the taxes. On what planet are you living?
Come on. The average tax plus penalty here was 500 Euros. No one is throwing their life away over a 500 Euro tax bill that any simpleton could plainly judge whether a pool does or does not exist at the address.
"Therefore, the mere fact that a law is selectively enforced against one person and not against another, absent bias or pattern of enforcement against a constitutionally-protected class, is not illegal."
I don't think breast size is a protected class - so please carry on officers
> a pretty smile you get off with a warning, but if you're black with resting bitch face then you'll get a ticket or maybe even some K9 action
Per your own example, America currently belongs in the "wors[t] dystopian case... [including] a lot of the third world" where laws are being used to harass those the state does not like.
I agree, to an extent, I just don't think the average American sees how far they have to go in terms of equality.
Illegal employment also goes hand in hand with exploitation.
https://www.dw.com/en/spains-sea-of-plastic-where-europe-get...
>(2019) The greenhouses of Almeria grow much of Europe's fruits and vegetables. The region's dark secret: Tens of thousands of migrants are apparently taken advantage of to fill supermarket produce sections.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50200217
>'Exploited' workers propping up the [UK] building sector (2019)
(Maybe the construction industry in the UK is worse for this than Denmark/Germany?)
And modern slavery
https://www.unseenuk.org/modern-slavery-in-construction-is-o...
>In the EU, construction ranks second only to the sex industry as the sector most prone to modern slavery.
Even North Korea is in on it (2016) https://www.dw.com/en/sent-from-north-korea-exploited-in-pol...
>Hundreds of North Korean workers are believed to be toiling in Poland under degrading conditions.
It's worth remembering that there are more people in slavery than there have ever been. I think we're "blind" to it much the same people must have been at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. It's normal. People are more interested in cheaper products and not paying their tax.
On the other hand freedom can't exist without the possibility of crime.
Much like drugs. What is it about prohibition that makes a crime more popular?
I'll abstain from discussing the legal and societal aspects of such tighter enforcement though I might say every enforcement needs some kind of "wiggle room"
How do people come up with these ideas?
Related to their income and overall wealth they pay disproportionate embarassingly little.
The "disrpoportionate" also includes well paid employees in the top 10%, but not the real 0.1% "owning" class. And above a few million worth, the actual money earned per year is usually obscured by all kinds of schemes, of which only the salary and capital gains tax ends up taxed (if that).
And that's without even considering the millions (pun intended) of ways they have to avoid being taxed but still have access to their money, from estates and "charity" foundations they control, to offshores, passing spending as expenses to their companies, special tax cuts, the ease of moving abroad for "tax reasons" at will (no biggie if you have the power to be accepted whether you go, the ability to pay the set amounts to acquire a foreign passport/nationality, to move with trivial for you costs, and so on), and of course access to teams of much better accountants...
It's legal. It's hardly fair. It means the working/middle class masses get to pay the burden of taxes (including sales taxes, and others) disproportionately to their income and wealth - and of course, the money taken from them is orders of magnitude more impactful on their everyday life than if we half of Bezos income (or even half his total wealth) was taxed away.
>and stealing from others is generally regarded as theft.
Only as long as you're not rich. If you're its normalized and has lots of legal avenues available to you to do that, same how unfairness is codified in laws like the above, in which "if you find a way to avoid income, you don't have any income to be taxed", which was made the case precisely because the rich have ample easy means to "avoid income".
1. Forces wealthy to liquidate assets. Impact: stock prices go down, real estate markets get excess supply floods, etc.
2. Forces income through taxable sales.
3. Theft
I fail to understand how taxing wealth is not stealing. Any time a wealthy person wants to utilize wealth to consume a product, someone somewhere is paying taxes on it. The closest that gets to not being true is when wealthy use their stock as collateral for loans and then get to take interest write offs, but the bank is still going to pay income tax on the interest income they receive.
Wealth means nothing until it is utilized, and all ways in which it's utilized are taxed.
In 2018 Trump's federal income tax was over 100x what mine was. But as a percentage of our respective incomes he paid 4.1% and I paid about 10%.
He's talking about the amount, you are talking about the percent of the taxpayer's income.
Of course, my first thought as to why that hasn't been possible is because there is a "lower bound" cost to such things that on a meta-level only really works if the rich do it. E.g. the $5k cost and $100k minimum bank balance to have a bank account in tax haven country X, and the $1600 yearly company registration fees to maintain a shell company in country Y.
INCOME taxes.
Which is NOT the same as WEALTH.
If you're going to talk about "the rich" then you need to differentiate between the wealthy ownership class (the people who own things like the debt for our 20 trillion dollar illegal wars, or your mortgage), and the software engineers and doctors who get spooked by any talk of raising taxes.
This guy explains the issue in simple terms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXP8gH0wddE - He's British, but it applies to the US also.
https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...
Here in the Netherlands that amounts to over 1% of total wealth.
It’s disproportionate by number of persons, but arguably proportionate by income.
[0] in 2020, US, top 1% paid 42% of income tax https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3894233-how-america-actu...
That source demonstrates that it’s definitely not proportionate by income.
> the top 1 percent paid 42.3 percent of the total federal income tax in 2020 while receiving 22.2 percent of total adjusted gross income
We have a progressive taxation system on income (for good reason), which causes the high-income to pay far more than their proportional share of income.
Some will argue that they should be paying an even more disproportionate amount, which is fine and we can have that discussion, but it is an absolutely truthful claim that they are already paying a higher than proportionate share now.
Rich is measured by income in the US because the federal gov can only tax income. Wealth taxes are thankfully unconstitutional.
Billionaires' effective tax rate in France is 26%. _I_ pay more than that just in revenue tax, not to mention value added tax, etc. People making over 627000€ per month have a 46% effective tax rate.
The rich do not pay their fair share, and benefit disproportionately from the taxes that I pay. It's not my trucks destroying public infrastructure, or polluting the atmosphere.
Hope you guys realize you are wealthy.
It doesn't need to be expensive; not every swimming pool has to be a large and fancy.
Tax evasion by the big fish is well known and clearly not in the spirit if the law: https://nos.nl/artikel/2440715-vermogenden-gebruiken-eigen-g...
They set up non profits and get rid of their taxable assets. This is well known, in my opinion not hard to get into court, but nobody “cares”. Of course we all know what is holding them back.
Color me unimpressed by fining some middle class people out of their pools.
At some point "fighting fraud" just becomes a cost-ineffective jihad rather than something meaningful.
Of course, tax auditors could just open any popular online map for a particular area, look at satellite view and do a quick count and then look up the addresses for that area. Diff that with the list of properties that do pay their taxes and job done, Tedious work and AI speeds that up. But it's not hard and the revenue is probably worth it. Also, from an AI point of view pool detection this isn't exactly rocket science.
And of course, a lot of these pools are actually mapped in open street map. I just checked this in a random part of France: 43.99847,4.92940 and compared with the satellite view in Google Maps. Lots of nice little pools that look like they are correctly mapped. An enterprising tax auditor might just export a list with a simple overpass query and them geocode them with nominatim to get the address.
Turns out that not even the notary, whose job is to check these things when a property changes hands, does it. I am in a local Facebook group and there are multiple folks saying they got a bill from the tax office for an undeclared pool. They bought the house recently and thought that everything was fine and now surprise.
Even worse, some of them don't even have permits, so on top of the extra taxes they have to go through the town permitting process from scratch.
It seems that the program mentioned in the article, which is from 2022, has now expanded nationwide. Would be nice if the French govt would publish some stats once they are done with it.
If all these rules were actually enforced — let's even assume impartially and perfectly — we would be overwhelmed by them. Maybe the consequence would be that we would refine some of the dumb little rules, and remove others. But maybe we would just be overwhelmed.
Imagine being charged 24 million euros (https://www.01net.com/actualites/piscines-non-declarees-la-t...) by Capgemini, known for having fucked up every single public -private partnership in France so they can just run OpenCV on satellite pictures, while being paid for a THIRTY PERCENT ERROR RATE
We have a Social Security card (Carte Vitale) that you show when doing medical activities (so to speak). It could have been a great driver for centralized patient documentation (results, prescriptions, ...). What they did instead - a totally fucked up system nobody uses (including doctors and pharmacies) which was architected and coded by an intern with a liberal art diploma.
Not only logging in is a shitshow but then you cannot add ANYTHING useful inside. Nothing.
OK, this failed so now the govt decided to launch a new program (for the same thing) and nobody understands what this is is how it is supposed to work.
At the same time, in Poland, I saw a perfectly well working system that centraizes everything (the public medical world sucks there but that's not the point). Why not reusing this instead of inventing a merdouille again?
When COVID blew up, we had the luck to have a brand new exchange platform for schools. When I had to use it, my children said "oh, I did not know that word" when i started to yell on the screen. It is so bad that by just typing here I risk to break my keyboard.
We have idiots in digitalization in France. I am sure other countries are the same but here this is a tradition since after the Minitel. If you can fuck it up, they will - with our taxes.
What? I tried to look it up, no luck. Do you have any link that goes into more details?
the compensation in these companies is all the proof you need, most of the money is spent on 'business guys' and whole big ladder of them, projects on the technical side get staffed by who can accept the least pay regardless of skill. failed to get your diploma, great they can hire you for a big discount, have an art degree or anything else but know how to argue in a interview great you're hired.
they hire such people by the shovel everywhere. they are not the only company that does it almost all the big and smaller ones. here are some example of job offers that you can translate, and keep in mind that even is you don't meet almost any criteria they can still hire you if you accept a small enough price. I know a few of them in person.
- https://fr.indeed.com/q-capgemini-reconversion-professionnel... - https://jobs.capgemini.com/fr-fr/job/Reconversion-Profession...
these a few example but search in indeed and other hiring webites and you'll find them spamming this kind of offers everywhere.
having a career as a tech guy in these companies is a dead end, and a recipe for depression.
So far it cost 2.5 times what it made.
But tbh i don't think the 30% error rate is relevant. How many photos did it analyze and how many did it select for human review?
Unless ... google being involved ... there was no human review.
The DGFiP is hit or miss with these projects, and they rarely hit well.
But the thing is... look at their share price. Capgemini is doing something right because their market cap is going up all the time.
Their consultants are relatively expensive to hire, and they themselves get paid relatively little.
They (and firms like them) spend a ridiculous, soul-crushing amount on sales. Building relationships with the people that matter, to then cut deals that, on the face of it, just don't make any sense. Delivering what you promise is entirely optional in this business model. (So in a nice symmetrical way their underpaid consultants are also often undertrained, because who cares)
C'est la vie, I'm afraid...
By the way, Bullion software support is them emailing redhat support, but more expensive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180323092106/https://projectfa...
HN conversation at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16793884
I have many doubts about the actual technical solution, but I wouldn't discard the work because it's for taxation purpose.
Or reform the broken democracy at the crux of it all.
Plus it is impolite to call for a revolution, even if we're talking about France
On some random weird "missions" [3] paid €9.000 a month, or life-long supposed "postings", granted at the discretion of the government, such as our dear ambassador to the penguins [4] [5] (lovingly called "ambassador to the poles", although the previous one, "Michel Rocard", a life-long politician, was apparently also known as "Rocky the Penguin").
And that’s just off the top of my head.
If we were to focus less on the rather questionable spending, and more on the doubtfully useful, we could cite the public health system, where it seems that more than a third of the money goes to the administrative side, and not actual healthcare workers [6], with a significantly bigger share of bureaucratic employees than most European countries.
And I’m pretty sure starving the state of revenue will not curb any of this. It’s not like they’ve shown they were sensible, or acting in good faith.
[1] https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2010/03/29/806733-ministre-...
[2]: https://la1ere.francetvinfo.fr/vol-350000-euros-autres-gouve...
[3]: https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2010/06/09/boutin-c...
[4]: https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/frais-d-ambassadrice-des-p...
[5]: https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2019/09/18/est-il-vrai-q...
[6]: https://www.challenges.fr/entreprise/sante-et-pharmacie/a-l-...
Look at the disgraceful fleecing of our national parks by Booz Allen: https://www.wsj.com/articles/national-park-fees-booz-allen-6...
So total revenue is not that significantly higher than €10m.
And the model will need to be rebuilt in 2 years.
If even a tiny amount of the money recovered improves the lot of the vulnerable then I find it hard to put this at the top of my "this year's dystopian" list.
Your comment however might go on my own "most unimaginative definition of dystopian" list.
Pools should be taxed but that does not solve the problem. Everyone pretends they are not looking at the elephant in the room: draconian environmental regulations and lack of resources make the prices of housing go higher and higher. The governments have the money to solve that, instead of making it worse
One of the reason many of us hate taxes is because they always have a "punishment" mindset.
They rather lose money and punish someone.
Why tax swimming pools anyway?
They are of one the biggest benificiaries of the modern western tax system.
It's a complicated problem to solve, but not a 25 million kind of complicated problem.
Also the bill isnt finished yet. 30% error rate, they are working on finetuning solving the issues.
AI making affluent people pay their share of taxes: Dystopian.
I wake up every day in a right wing dystopia. Even worse, people like you lack the knowledge or solidarity with other workers while having too much nationalism and so on.
I’m going to assume you wouldn’t be able to explain China’s politics nor explain why Taiwan is granted sovereignty but Palestine isn’t. Both places had people before each imperialist group of people conquered land where people already lived. When’s the last time any typical westerner has ever cared about the indigenous people of Taiwan. This doesn’t contradict anything. More of a case where I’m stating the obvious. Even if you happen to actually care about the indigenous people, you’re still going to arrogantly believe Taiwan is a Democratic good guy country. Let’s not even get into Taiwan being fascist for some time…
I don't quite get why you differentiate between classes, everybody has to pay taxes. I would prefer the tax agency to go after (illegally evaded) tax revenue where they get the most bang for their buck, this project paid itself back in less than a year so that seems to fit the bill.
Sure, the agency can get more of the non-super-rich people who don't have an army of accountants optimizing their tax structure, but I don't think that's the most equitable thing to do.
This project https://www.gas.scigrid.de/ used a similar approach to map gas pipelines
- be affraid of a big general AI that will destroy humanity like ChatGPT
- recognize pools in garden from sat images
Actually, if the title was only "French Tax service find 20k hidden taxable swimming pools in France, netting €10M", nobody would care... and it would be fair!!! There is no "Intelligence" in this...
Over a decade ago I was hired to do a privacy impact assessment for a government project that was going to "use AI to detect benefits fraud." Turned out under the architecture docs, the "AI" was a data repository managed by one of the big credit reporting companies, and their "AI" would flag back individuals to the govt benefits agency for further scrutiny. The company got to keep the data, there was no anonymization or de-identification, let alone any consideration of how the company would use the data after, or for re-linking the data to other data sets to make credit decisions about household members and other relations. The fact that the government was outsourcing their fraud detection to the very credit reporting and collection agencies who would be exploiting the data for credit decisions was also what nobody was supposed to say out loud or write down.
The point is, so-called AI in this case was used as a proxy to hide a relationship between the government and a private company and as a way to absolve either of any accountability for marking someone as a suspect for benefits fraud. The govt didn't have to make or document a regulation mandating them to do fishing expeditions, or create a paper trail on how random their selection of someone was for scrutiny, nor did they have to disclose that their AI system was just the sleazy credit reporting company pretending to be an "AI."
The problem with proxying decisions through so-called AI is that the bureaucracy only exists by its direct mandates, and the people in it are always trying to get around the constraints that imposes, so in these cases, AI is just a false-pretext generation machine. That any agency can act using "randomness," in any situation at all is a level of discretion that is very likely to be inconsistent with their actual mandates, imo.
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Whats baffeling - is that the SEC should be all over this methodology - in fact - I am sure that there a re people out there right now building an AI to riffle through the Panama Papers and other "papers" scandals looking at shell companies for a way to blackmail those who are storing wealth in such.
Or using ai to find chinks-in-the-armor for ways to exploit said shell companies and their 'anonymous' owners...
I presonally used ChatGPT as well as AutoGPT to dive into Opensecrets.org and other online resources to look into the finances of congress - what their tenure is, age, salary, investments, committees served on and then major defense inititives, and the investments of congress into those contractors.
What I am trying to do is build a table of acts/laws passed which benefitted defense contractors, and then the stated investments by congress just prior to said defense deals which should reveal insider trading pretty definitively...
I assume the average pool is less than 30 m2. I wonder how much effort people actually made to 'hide' their pool for not having to pay such rather small amount compared to pool building and maintenance. Plus there is the effort of building and maintaining this 'AI' system.
Low hanging fruit are the ones that aren't covered.
An office of a client in worked in build a small wooden extension on the roof without requesting a permit (because that's so easy)
A drone detected it and they had to break it down, not sure if they were also fined.
France is a bit more spread out :)
Sounds like the tax authority just DDoSed itself with this, because processing all these changes is going to take some time.
Working for Facebook or Google or Amazon is less ethical, in my view.
I agree that working in adtech is more of a bummer though.
Pools are good for cooling down in the summer. Is it better if they use electricity and A/C instead?
The worst thing is that other countries are copying this anti-pool thing because it's populist .
It's not even going after pools in particular, it's just that pools raise the property tax. you're supposed to ask your city if you can build that pool, and your taxes will grow in consequence. Undeclared, no taxes.
And yes, filling up pools is banned in most of the country right now because we're going through a year long drought.
Yep
> Pools are good for cooling down in the summer. Is it better if they use electricity and A/C instead?
There is not much A/C in France/Europe. Go to a lake or a public pool instead, no need for A/C.
> The worst thing is that other countries are copying this anti-pool thing because it's populist .
It is necessary. Not populist, necessary. We can't afford to just scream "freedom" or "populism" every time the upper middle-class wants to enjoy an environment-destroying luxury. Think of the freedom to live of the others. Is a pool necessary ? Of fsking course not. Don't try to color this as a basic need. You don't need a pool to cool down in the summer. You also don't need a 2 tons car, you don't need to travel to the other side of the world for your holidays, and those things are very detrimental to everyone, you included.
The rest is the same tired usual drivel