Beware of fraudsters. The Directorate General of Public Finances announced, Monday, August 29 to AFP, that its device for detecting undeclared swimming pools by artificial intelligence had made it possible to collect around 10 million euros and that it was going to generalize it to all of France. . “The generalization will be done gradually on all the departments in France from September”she said, confirming information from the newspaper The Parisian.
The device, called “Innovative Land”, was developed in partnership with the consulting firm Capgemini and the American digital giant Google: it makes it possible to detect constructions or developments on aerial images and to check whether they have been declared and are properly taxed. It has been tested since last year in nine departments (Alpes-Maritimes, Var, Bouches-du-Rhône, Ardèche, Rhône, Haute-Savoie, Morbihan, Maine-et-Loire and Vendée) to detect undeclared swimming pools and found more than 20,000, according to a report from Public Finance.
“This represents nearly 10 million euros in additional revenue for the municipalities concerned for the year 2022 alone”, indicates the Directorate General of Public Finances (DGFiP). Of these 10 million euros, 5.7 million were collected to rectify the lack of taxation in previous years and 4.1 million for the 2022 property tax, which constitutes a resource “persistent” for municipalities according to the DGFiP.
She believes that “gains in local direct taxes should reach nearly 40 million euros in 2023”once the device is generalized. “These new resources, which will be partly recurrent for local authorities, will ensure the profitability of the project from its second year of deployment”she further specifies, while its cost is estimated at 24 million euros over 2021-2023.
Swimming pools, whether buried or above ground, must be declared as any construction which increases the rental value of a property, from the moment they cannot be moved without demolishing them. They are taken into account in the housing tax and the property tax. In September, the CGT Finances Publique union in Bouches-du-Rhône expressed its “worry” vis-à-vis the project, believing that it allowed “to save money” and to avoid recruiting agents in a context of continuous reduction in the number of staff at the DGFiP for several years.