> The tax authorities say the software could eventually be used to find undeclared home extensions, patios or gazebos, which also play a part in property taxes.
Well, let's not be over optimistic. The PM in charge of the project on the taxe administration side is probably happy that his project is going well. However, different branches of the state are already doing that with tree line and tree coverage change for farmers subsidies. That project is not going well because of the large amount of false positives.
Trying to spot undeclared house extension will very likely follow the same path because the problem is infinitely more difficult, the data ("cadastre") is messy and Capgemini is absolutely not capable of handling that complexity by lack of skills and experience.
ok but if the tax authorities in France are anything like the tax authorities in other countries they will levy the taxes and it's up to you to prove a false positive while the fines etc. rack up.
This is redicolous. At some point we have admit as a civilisation we have failed, when there are drones or sattelites taking fotos of our back yards -all the time- just do idenfiy those 10 people in a neigbourhood that have "saved" 300 bucks a year.
I mean sure its France where they think a little different about privacy, but you can make sure that once the quality is good enough, someone will put your naked butt on the internet, because they found them while doing "routine work"-
And no, neither google earth or bing or apple have detailed enough picture quality to identify anything. on purpose. That will not however be true for the drone your local gov uses.
Im not trying to create a state of naked people either, but the point still stand that if you need this tech to find a couple of pools, you might as well put cameras everywhere.
That's a ridiculous argumentation. This infrastructure was not built or maintained "just do idenfiy those 10 people in a neigbourhood that have "saved" 300 bucks a year". It exists for lots of different, likely more useful use cases, and this is just another added usecase that can utilise already existing infrastructure for no added cost.
Your statement is comparable to calling it ridiculous that we have roads "just so an ice cream truck can sell ice cones to neighbourhood kids during the summer". That's obviously not the main use case for roads.
Yes, there are aerial photos since the 50s, no, it's not possible for humans to scan all of them, not in a life time.
> 10 people in a neigbourhood that have "saved" 300 bucks a year.
That's not the point.
The points are:
- social justice, if I pay you have to pay. If you don't pay taxes to IRS what happens? I bet they use a lot more than AI to find people who eludes them...
- undisclosed pools (and other undisclosed properties) are a proxy for other illegal activities. For example in Italy villas of sentenced criminals are usually hidden. This way the State could find them and confiscate them.
Anyway in Italy they have already discovered more than 20 thousand undisclosed pools. And the job is not done yet.
EDIT: I work in an insurance company, we use similar techniques to identify buildings in satellite images and compare them to same pictures after a flood or a fire, to estimate damages.
It could be done by human eyes, It would take years.
This way clients are reimbursed swiftly and can start rebuilding what has been damaged.
Probably will get downvoted but I don’t think paying taxes leads to more social justice. There are some exceptions where government actions are closer to the people they represent, but in general I have the impression that most governments are like an ever growing intransparent entity that serves primarily itself.
> Probably will get downvoted but I don’t think paying taxes leads to more social justice
I completely disagree (many rich people think the same way you do, this is not a novel argument, it is as old as taxes themselves), but the point was not on taxes, but on justice.
Meaning that if you pay a tax because - like it or not - you have to pay for it, I should pay it too, if we are in the same situation.
That's what I meant for "social justice", the obligation towards the community to fulfill your duties the same way other members of the community do.
Im afraid I’m not convinced. Taxes are often confusing to a point that you need experts to understand the whole construct and even then there’s disagreement. I don’t think that’s justified.
The “community” has very little say in what happens with this money and even if they do, I don’t think it’s always justified because a large group thinks it is.
And finally I think that taxes mostly limit social mobility by putting a cap on what you can do with the money you’ve earned (yourself). I don’t think other people are entitled to such a proportion of my income.
I moved from Europe to a place with significantly lower taxes, I have a lot more to put on the side every month and can take part of it for retiring and part of it to invest in new ideas. Back home I was covering costs + a little consumption and the rest went to the state which realistically didn’t provide for much (social security only helps once you’ve fully landed on the street, universities were pretty mediocre so I studied in the US partially funded by parents and partially through teaching, need private insurance for health care unless you want to wait for ages to get treatment, etc. - so I paid for a lot of things that I couldn’t benefit from). Government functions much better too and filing my taxes took minutes without any external help, so I’m less distracted. And overall I have a way better quality of life and I’m much happier.
The question of justice hinges not on whether the state spends wisely, whether we should have lower taxes, or whether we should have alternative systems of deliberation to better gather citizen feedback. The question is whether it's just to have some people evade taxes. I'm on the side of more tax enforcement (that does not mean I support higher or lower taxes) because I believe it is the rich and powerful who are most adept at evading taxes.
The more those who are good at evading taxes get away with it, the more burden the poor and middle class must shoulder.
I think it’s mostly the middle class suffering. Would a billionaire save 300€ a year for a pool? And does the IRS need so many more agents to chase rich people?
Also without an army of tax consultants and lawyers it’s easy to not be aware of everything you need or don’t need to pay, and most likely you’ll end up overpaying. At the same time richer people will have opportunities to legally reduce their tax bill that ordinary people don’t have.
Unlike for instance in Germany, I’m not paying for my boss to have a lower tax rate than I do.
“The French Newspaper Le Parisien calculated that an average pool measured at 322 square feet is taxed 200 Euros per year.”
I think the middle class should be able to afford a 8x4m pool outside of big cities. Especially since other large expenditures like overpriced cars aren’t that big of a deal in France.
The cost of building a pool in France is widely given as being between €15,000 and €50,000. This is for the pool, and you need to add on the cost of the surrounds, whether this is a paved area or wooden deck.
Then there are maintenance costs, electricity costs, cleaning costs etc.
> taxed 200 Euros per year
that's an estimate based on the lower possible height (50cm and lower) because the images don't give you a sense of how deep the pool is.
If you have 15 to 50k to put in a non productive, unsellable asset, you're at least upper middle class, even in the US. Bourgeois see themselves as middle class as much as working class do. Funny.
> And finally I think that taxes mostly limit social mobility by putting a cap on what you can do with the money you’ve earned
Now imagine you don't pay taxes and want to move from New York to San Francisco.
Well man, you know what? You did not pay for this road, so for you it's... let's see... 17,433.25 dollars. Paid in advance, thanks.
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You're from a lower social class, you go to work using public, ehm, sorry, collective transport (it is a private service), because you can't afford to own a car and the gas is so expensive!
And those roads tariffs! they don't care how much you earn, they are the same to everyone, for you as for the richest man in the Country.
Every month you have to pay 400 dollars to the collective transport company, they need to raise the money for building and maintaining the infrastructure and to pay their employees.
You have been thinking about asking for a salary raise, but you've overheard management say "people coming to work with collective transport are often late, thank god there are good workers using cars, those are the ones we should promote"
So you're now thinking about getting into debts to buy a car and gamble or play it safe and accept your salary.
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Would you prefer it?
Would it favour social mobility?
> I moved from Europe to a place with significantly lower taxes, I have a lot more to put on the side every month
No shit Sherlock!!!
You know what else helped me to put a lot more on the side every month?
Accepting job offers that paid more than the one I had!
Incredible, isn't it?
Try being born there in the same conditions your family was when you were born and then you can compare the two situations.
Anyway what was your Country in Europe?
Because if your family could afford to pay your studies in USA, in Europe you could have lived as a king with that kind of money.
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OF COURSE if you only think about yourself, being surrounded by people that pay for you while you enjoy the money you earn it's wunderbar!
Not caring about other people's well being, that also is a big relief.
But it has nothing to do with justice, let alone being part of a larger community, called society, that's simply "Homo homini lupus"
I hate this reasoning. You see, my dad paid taxes. He was a government employee so it was spelled out in his contract what he was paying for. Pension. Both a yearly pension (meaning extra days off), and an inflation-adjusted elderly pension (and a whole bunch of other things).
Needless to say, the government never paid either of those things. The days in a year were taken away. Not with a new contract. Not with new negotiations. It was just a new law (not even a voted-on law, just a ministerial note).
He lost about 2 years of pension outright this way, and his pension was never inflation-adjusted (first they delayed the adjustments, then they "skipped some", then they canceled it). That means that after this year, 6 years into his pension, he is now on the minimum possible pension. This is explicitly what the government promised would never happen.
Of course, he never gets to take back the decades of work he put in to not get in this situation. Worse than that, the government has actually invited him to come back because there's a teacher shortage ...
So now he gets exactly the same pension as someone who never worked a day in their life. Which the government is currently promising will never happen.
Please explain to me why I would pay taxes to a state that has even less intention to abide by the deal they're presenting than it did when my dad signed those contracts and worked 40+ years as a teacher? And if I go somewhere else and pay NO taxes at all, ever, to the state, I can come back when I'm 65 and get exactly the same pension.
Social justice, REALITY:
1) we'll lie to you so you work for us
2) we are the government, so we use the law to change the meaning of your contract AFTER you put in the work
3) we'll lie about what we're doing every step of the way
4) and after that ... and people refuse to work for us, they'll "invite" you back to DO MORE WORK ...
5) IF he still had more than the minimum pension, doing this "voluntary" extra work would be the only way he could maintain an above-minimum pension. This is still not fixing the situation.
6) I'm willing to bet step 6 is making the pension drop below the minimum unless he goes back to work. If you calculate what it would take to get enough teachers, it's roughly double what they're paying now. There is no chance in hell the government will do that, so they'll lie and cheat somewhere else, and this seems to me an obvious thing to do (and is "being talked about")
You can keep your social justice, thanks. I'll be somewhere else. Clearly following the rules of social justice pays EXACTLY the same as ... not doing anything at all (plus they don't "invite" you back after 65 to do more work, nor do they cut your pension below minimum ...)
You don't need very detailed imagery to spot a swimming pool. The Google earth type images are enough.
It can also be used to spot building extensions etc. And it also gives a hint on other cheating and crime, for example if the household is on benefits, pays no tax and all of a sudden a pool pops up in the garden. It might still be legit, but at least an investigation can be done.
Sure it might be seen a bit over the top, but what are the alternatives? If people do not declare when it is taxable, then things might need to be enforced. Sure these taxes could be removed, but at the same time it might be fair to tax people who can afford building a pool. Probably better than increasing tax on work.
Ah then the perspective makes more sense. German privacy is something different.
However it tends to be individual privacy. A grainy picture of a pool processed without judgement by an algorithm feels a lot like panorama rights to me. The software sees the same thing I can see on Google Maps.
Oh please. If they have to do it they should go the satellite image way, way less pollution, less noise and at least a chance to get everyone not just a bunch of random unlucky people.
> What I do have a problem with is unnecessary surveillance of the innocent.
so in your opinion police patrolling the streets are an "unnecessary surveillance of the innocent"?
because disclosed pools are already known to the State. Technically is not surveillance if they already know that you have a pool and they actually find a pool there (what a surprise!)
What if the image processing is only allowing them to detect potential undeclared pools, and they only issue the corresponding fine once it has been confirmed by a guy in a plane (or at ground level) who has been sent to double-check?
They call it "AI", but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they've just run some basic pattern recognition on their stock of aerial GIS imagery, searching for blueish rectangles on land tagged as residential. It's probably the sort of thing that could have also been done 20 years ago or even more.
I used to work for Cognizant - they are very good at using the latest hype words to bag a client, so I fully agree with you. The same story from a different source was posted a couple of days back, and I said the same, simple pattern recognition can do this just fine.
It looks like there are two sides: people who want to buy a house and want it to cost a sane amount of money, and people who own a house and want it to increase in price. The latter would obviously ridicule this.
To me the problem is more the assumption that a pool automatically increases the value of a property. Or rather that increasing the value of a property should increase your tax burden. Insert sales pitch for Land Value Tax here.
we call it pool tax for simplicity, but pools are not taxed per se.
the fact is that if your pool is undisclosed, you haven't requested the necessary authorizations (what you actually pay for), which means it is not deemed safe.
Pools are taxed directly when they are considered a luxury item in a house that have all the features (there's a list) of a luxury residence.
It's already a progressive tax, it couldn't be any different here, progressivity of taxation is written in our Constitution.
There's also that pools are not a free imposition on the community. There's a regulatory apparatus that must be followed - i.e. appropriate child-safety fencing to ensure children do not drown, and your neighbors have a right to not have it built in a way which impacts their property (i.e. proximity to fencing boundaries).
I bat an eye. If you as a voter re-elect wasteful or corrupt politicians, or as a shareholder/owner re-elect wasteful or corrupt corporate boards, then you can't be surprised at the outcome.
Yes, plenty do. Whataboutism is not a strong argument.
Tax evasion massively erodes people's trust in institutions. If it's prevalent enough, cheating becomes the default option, and things fall apart quickly.
Yes, but when the big guys' cheating is worth millions all while costs of living are going up and income inequality is rising, I really can't blame the commoner cheating for a few hundred bucks. I don't mind it becoming the default option - at least it'll put everyone on a level playing field.
Nobody has managed to tackle the problem of the big guys cheating, partly because when you’re at the level where you can make a difference you realise it’s more profitable to join the cheaters than fight them.
Maybe if there weren't taxes on so many things and the system were more reasonable, easier to navigate, and easier to understand, people would be more compliant. It's annoying that government in most western countries insists on involvement in so many aspects of daily life. This is meant as a general comment, not specific to France.
To bring some context, temporary above ground pools are exempted, I don’t know if the software makes the distinction, but the global system software + tax people has to make it.
I can’t think they’re after people who don’t declare their pools. They’re after people who build swimming pools on land where it’s illegal to build them, making the value of their land much higher than it is worth.
In france there are tons of places where it’s illegal to build pools, but if no one notices for 10 years, you’re officially off the hook, so a lot of people try their luck.
The firemen too like to have swimming pools around in dry areas as water reserves. So even if someone finds out about your pool, you may still get away with a fine.
Well, let's not be over optimistic. The PM in charge of the project on the taxe administration side is probably happy that his project is going well. However, different branches of the state are already doing that with tree line and tree coverage change for farmers subsidies. That project is not going well because of the large amount of false positives.
Trying to spot undeclared house extension will very likely follow the same path because the problem is infinitely more difficult, the data ("cadastre") is messy and Capgemini is absolutely not capable of handling that complexity by lack of skills and experience.