AI detects 20,000 hidden taxable swimming pools in France, netting €10m AI software has detected more than 20,000 secret private swimming pools in aerial photography, helping French tax officials bag about €10 million (£ 8.6 million) in extra property levies. Home improvements, such as the addition of a loft or a pool, can boost the value of a property and increase the taxes homeowners pay in the …
seems fair to me.
I wonder how many unauthorised extensions it would find in the UK ? Although I can't see it getting a chance. Too many vested interests in it remaining "the sort of thing the French do" as the UK sinks further down towards it's mates at the bottom of the trusted government scale.
I figure this may be a business opportunity to sell drone-targeting lasers and camouflage pool covers (at a price less than the extra cost of handing out even MORE money to gummints) to people who prefer privacy over the 'surveillance state'.
(I would not mind so much if my tax money really DID buy "civilization". But thinking you're buying "civilization" is just an idealistic dream, concerning the deep levels of waste, fraud, an abuse that is actually being purchased INSTEAD)
Good luck blinding satellites in LEO.
My questions is did the tax collectors interface with the homeowners' insurance companies? At least in the U.S. having a pool installed will change your insurance premiums.
I hope they use google earth to find out how long the pools have been there, they may be able to get $100M.
Property taxes are normally collected by the local authority - who are also the planning authority who gave permission for the swimming pool in the first place. And in some small councils, these are even the same physical people. Don't these idiots talk to each other - or even themselves?
No it's 2 different organisations in France with >2 times the consequential bureaucracy. For them to communicate directly would be far too simple for the French - who would audit the data etc.
The detail required in the forms for the two types of property tax in France (fonciere and habitation) is unbelievable. Unchecked rampant snooping to counter a culture of personal secrecy. They want the size of all the rooms, corridors, number of bathrooms, size of attic space, cellar, square metres of patio area - yes they charge you for that, size of pool, whether an inflatable pool can be considered permanent, number of outbuildings and purpose of each one, size and purpose of all land, whether you have a terrestrial TV aerial which is I suppose their version of a TV licence tax.
to avoid tax "sticker shock", particularly for those who could LEAST afford it, one great thing that cali-forn-you ACTUALLY did, before it fell off the cliff politically, was called "Proposition 13", back in the mid 70's. Housing prices were skyrocketing (you could turn a 10% profit by buying a house and paying only interest like it was rent, and then selling it after a year). Since gummints LOVED to re-assess the houses that were already paid for, the massive increases in taxation were literally driving grandparents and retirees out of their "bought and paid for" homes. SO, the law was RIGHTFULLY changed, in that once you buy a house, the assessed value can NEVER exceed the purchase price, for tax purposes anyway. That means that when you buy it, the tax is essentially the same until you sell it.
(It was one of the few moments of sanity that came out of Sacramento, nearly 50 years ago - and many of my high school teachers were REALLY MAD about it, because they LOVED their money-pile budgets, and they had to start LIVING WITHING THEM like EVERYONE ELSE!)
Actually, the assessed value can be increased annually but only by a relatively small amount. Back in the 70s what triggered Proposition 13 wasn't so much the dramatic increases in property tax levels as the potential for these -- people in our neighborhood that have lived there since the 70s are only paying nominal amounts (but then houses that cost them in the mid-$30K are now selling for around a million so its not all bad). (Its not all profit, either -- Capital Gains Tax.]
Prop 13 was a bit of a bait an switch. Property is only reassessed on sale (or substantial improvement but that's not significant). Since its relatively easy to avoid selling commercial properties -- they're owned by companies so you sell the company, not the property -- it means that many commercial properties are still enjoying an artificially low tax base. Whether this was understood at the time is debatable, I'd guess that the typical homeowner was driven by the fear of being thrown out of their home but the intent was to cap commercial rates at an artificially low level.
I know someone who lives in Los Altos and would like to sell his house now that he's retired. He can't afford to because he's owned it for 40 yrars and so his property taxes are set based on the 1980s value. It's worth millions now, but if he sold it to buy a smaller, cheaper, home his retirement income wouldn't be enough to pay the property taxes on the new house.
It's an American thing. They whine and complain like death is at their door when they need to take an extra slim DIME out of their pockets in additional taxes...
yet continue to expect the same BENEFITS.
In this case, they throw a fit like spoilt children every time the school budget gets raised if *they* don't have children in the system, but then complain VERY LOUDLY when underpaid teachers quit the school district and the whiner's property values go down because of this.
They want something for nothing. Always. Constantly. The social responsibility of keeping schools open only applies when *they* need said schools....otherwise, the school system can rot in hell for all they care.
As long as they can flip their house with a good school district.
Actually, many places only allow a certain restricted range of colours, so quaint towns don't ends up looking like a poor knock off of Alamo Square Park.
Around here, it's white, battleship grey, or Bretagne (sky) blue; though the mayor does seem to tolerate a sort of burgundy red.
Some clueless Brits painted their shutters black, opposite the church (!), and then to really annoy the locals they claimed to be witches. Amusingly/astonishingly, they seemed to be using Charmed (!!!) as their instruction manual. El Reg doesn't support the facepalm emoji, so you'll just have to imagine it here.
There was a bloke in a town near us who was refused planning permission to put double glazing in (it's a listed building so the council can interfere more).
He appealed, but no luck. So he had the house painted in a ridiculous lavender colour, as you can do that without planning in most places. It was a standoff for years until he sold up. Sadly, now it's reverted to white.
It'd never work in the UK.
We could easily buy satellite photography and train an AI to try to identify buildings and match potential land registry data. We could even then buy more data next year and look for new buildings and construction.
But there are two main problems. The first is that local planning permission system may not feed accurate data back. As an example, remember a certain Dominic Cummings? The starting point for his notorious eye checkup was his parent's farm, but there were questions about whether the building on it was kosher: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-52911605
At the time I heard all kinds of statements about this being an outhouse because it lacked a kitchen, or other stupid loopholes in planning law. I'm not qualified to judge such things, but this did teach me that determining such things will be way beyond what an AI with some photos and a database of coordinates can be sure of.
The second issue is related.
The moment a donor to the Conservative party gets a visit about their new "outhouse" and what it means for their tax bill is the moment that the project dies. This government condones corruption, and would always stand with its friends and donors rather than have them pay their due.
Nonsense, it happens all the time. The local councils just fire up google earth and take a look. There was a farmer who built a house behind hay bales a few years ago.
Difference being that we're not taxed the same year. I had building work done on my house 17 years ago. All legal and declared. Our council tax rating now has an asterix next to it. That means that when we sell, the council can change the rating to a higher band.
Planning permission is not always needed.
Permitted development allows quite a bit of building without PP, only building regs.
I'd like to know why my home is Band E and the other half of the semi is Band D yet their extension is almost twice the size of mine. None of this makes sense.
I'd like to know why my home is Band E and the other half of the semi is Band D yet their extension is almost twice the size of mine.
The band is assessed when the house is purchased. If they built their extension after purchase then the property band won’t change until they sell.
I am the same, I am in one band lower than I should be because I built the extension.
"this did teach me that determining such things will be way beyond what an AI with some photos and a database of coordinates can be sure of"
That's not really important though, because the machine analysis is only the starting point. Sending out tax assessors, or whoever, to scour the entire surface of a country looking for problems is not particularly reasonable or cost efficient. So you feed satellite photos into some sort of image analysis software and it highlights a bunch of things it thinks look like buildings or pools or whatever that aren't supposed to be there. Now instead of having to look literally everywhere, you have maybe a few thousand specific locations to look at. And most of them can probably be checked by having a human look at the same images the software did first without needing to actually visit them in person.
It's not necessary for the software to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough to be useful as a first pass to point people in the right direction. Figuring out all the paperwork and loopholes is still going to be a job for the lawyers, all the software does is make it a bit easier to find places that might need to have that paperwork checked.
"I wonder how many unauthorised extensions it would find in the UK ?"
Depends on how big and when built, it might not change the taxable value anyway. Lots of extensions can be built simply by getting them approved by Buildings Regs, no planning consent needed, especially if they are not visible from the front of the property. A pool may require a structural survey because of the weight and how it may affect nearby foundations, but unless the improvements are likely to change the tax band (and even then, IIRC only if/when you sell it) it's unlikely to be relevant.
For non-UK peeps reading, the Council Tax (property tax) is based on your property falling into one of 5 or 6 valuation bands, not the actual value of the property itself so everyone in a particular tax band pays the same amount. If it's currently near the bottom of one band, that allows for a decent increase in value by improving it before it might cross over into the next higher tax band.
I'm a bit surprised there was no mention of checking who buys pool chemicals, or provides pool services.
I'd have thought access to that data would help identify pools which are not visible from above. And help to confirm information from other sources.
(Not saying I want them to do so.)
I'm a bit surprised there was no mention of checking who buys pool chemicals, or provides pool services.
Just moved to a house in France with a pool this year...
Pool services Hahahahaha... Nobody comes out unless you have major work to be done, at least in our area, we called the company who put our pool in (we had no experience) to give us a rundown on the system, no go, not even for fee. We paid cash for our shock and chlorine etc... The rest was up to me to learn as we go.
French* workers (that includes local government officers) need to be 'bribed' if you want them to do any actual work. It doesn't have to be a brown envelope full of notes, a nice bottle or even a homemade cake will work wonders - you're apologising for the inconvenience you're putting them to. But Brits aren't aware of this culture, and get rotten service.
* applies equally to most of southern Europe.
Because that would mean requesting that shops keep files on who buys what, and then give access to that personal information. All of which is restricted by the GDPR, and of course, is trivially defeated by using cash.
Whereas looking over the fence has always been legal.
Also, don't worry to much: a pool that's truly not visible from above is unlikely to be one that needs to be declared: those under 10m² are exempt.
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F35108/0_0?idFicheParent=F31404&lang=en#0_0
Not really. I bought 25kg of fertilizer. Had to give my name and address. Plus confirm it would be kept under lock and key (anti-terror laws to stop me making a bomb).
Similarly, I had to register and take a test to be able to buy proper rat poison. I can only buy if I present the certificate.
It’s very different. In both of these cases, you gave your consent in advance of the purchaes for the autorities to have your details; and you are the direct beneficiary of the purchases (I don’t know French laws on this, but I suspect it is a criminal offence to buy controlled poisons for an unidintified third party).
That’s very different to the government going to a pool-cleaning supplier and demanding their customer lists for the sole purposes of conducting a tax investigation. There’s no public safety grounds for doing this that would override the lack of consent from the purchasers.
However, if the French taxman is like his Irish cousin (who I do know about), they can —and will— look at the tax returns of the construction and pool-cleaning companies to estimate how many pools there are in each company’s catchment, and they can then compare that with the property improvement declarations in that are to see if they tally. If not, an on-the-ground investigation can be conducted to find out who’s dodging. All of this can be discovered without knowing one customer name or address, so GDPR does not apply. This story sounds like they used the satellite imagery as a replacement for that on-the-ground survey in certain Départments where there was already an anomoly, rather than them starting from a blank sheet.
And how they find the construction companies is by tracking their inputs. It’s hard to build anything without materials, and the suppliers are far more diligent with their paperwork - if they’re not, they don’t stay in business for long.
It’s actually pretty hard to fiddle your taxes these days if you have any kind of input costs. Once caught, you open yourself to some very severe penalties, and there’s very little room for argument.
The reason is that there are two taxes in play: income tax on profits, and VAT on inputs; and the amount you claim/remit in VAT and the income you report for income-tax need to tally - the ratio doesn’t matter, so long as it’s within the acceptable range for your business type and region, but the revenue offices have very good models for different types of business, and they know within a copuple of percent how these figures need to line up.
To avoid tax, therefore, you have to underdeclare not just profit but also inputs. The problem is that if you underdeclare VAT, you’re directly stealing from the government, and the penalties for this are swift and severe. But, if you underdeclare income for tax, while paying your correct VAT to avoid prosecution, now your input costs don’t match your declared profits, and you get audited and eventually end up with a big tax demand.
Some builders, I've seen, get their customer to pay the materials supplier directly, and just bill them for labour costs.
Of course, there is a genuine business reason for this in reducing bad debt risk. But it probably helps with doing less legitimate stuff as well.
Yes, for almost every purchase or service most people will ever need, you pay someone to do the job and/or deliver the service. But anything to do with "building", you "employ" a builder. And most seem to not carte about whether you know what you are doing if it's right or not. After all, you only "employed" them to do what you asked. If it all goes pear-shaped, then *you* should have also "employed" a surveyor, architect, project manager etc. Can you imagine if that was the case when having gas or electrical work done? (Which you probably also are if it;s a big job)
Gas or electrical work are usually quite a different matter. You don't get them afterwards. They're inclusive with the architect's plans and usually need to be approved by the commune or the energy supplier. If you're hiring some idiot (noone else would even think of doing that) to install whatever gas or electrical thingies you've been "planning" without having a clue you might get what you deserve.
Yeah, that's the point I was making. Most approved leccys or gas fitters will tell you if what you want doing is wrong, illegal, dangerous or otherwise ill-advised. A "builder" generally won't. And you won't normally have an architect involved in adding on a conservatory, probably not even getting Planning involved if the brickwork is less than 2 feet high, but you may well want an electric spur adding to service it.
And FWIW, an architects plans will generally only show where power outlets are going to be. The sparky will decide if they are in the right places and deal with wiring them up properly, making sure the wiring is routed properly and safely within the constraints of the plans, or even tell the plans are shite, job can't be completed legally and to go back to the architect and have the plans changed.
Water use is also a clue because pools use a lot of water. At least the French have started raising the price of water in places where it's getting scarce. Spain is heading full speed for a collapse of its system because it doesn't its increasingily scarce ground water properly. And once that's gone, there's nothing they can do.
Spanish water companies are regional monopolies as they are elsewhere but most are publicly owned companies which do not make a profit hence the reason for lower bills. Unlike the UK and France, there are no flat-rate unlimited use water tariffs which is as it should be.
Perhaps they could start raising tariffs for businesses, now, but that would be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Farms are already going under due to the cost of electricity as they are in other countries.
Risky. Especially if you decide you want to change the contents of the pond for the latest fashion in reeds or Koi. You might end up with protestors camping out in your garden and building tree-houses to "protect" the Great Crested Newts that you once claimed were there to avoid taxes :-)
AI is what the computer can't do yet.
When articles use the phrase AI, what they actually mean is 'narrow' or 'weak' AI i.e. machine learning to develop an algorithm to solve a very specific problem, which computers can demonstrably do today. What you're referring to is called 'general' AI, which as you say computers most definitely aren't capable of yet.
Antoine Magnant, the deputy director general of public finances, told Le Parisien: "We are particularly targeting house extensions like verandas.
"But we have to be sure that the software can find buildings with a large footprint and not the dog kennel or the children's playhouse," he added.
Unsurprising
Currently I have a few bright blue tarpaulins (overall area more than 10m2 French pool min size) spread in my garden (to kill off some grass, ready to sew wildflower seeds next year).
I'm sure it would look like a pool to an AI - rectangular and blue
And lets not even get into the fun of shadows - anyone who has taken lots of outdoor photos will have encountered occasional odd blue or purple shadows.
I'm guessing AI could well have issues with a blue shadow of reasonable size (10m2 is not that large)
Also worth noting that the "Moroccan style" garden look comes in and out of fashion and when a garden styled in that way often involves blue tiles / paint, could potentially look like a pool.
A koi pond* would be above minimum pool size, but if used for fish, would not count as a swimming pool.
Even a simple task can be difficult (and consider potential dismal resolution of the imagery - in the area I live Google satellite view images are so poor you would struggle to ID a house in some situations never mind the verandas / extensions etc. they dream of finding in future)
Yes, you can get koi pools below 10m2, but the koi enthusiasts I know have ponds larger than that
The article stated satellite photos, and since it's Google involved, it's going to be Google Earth/Maps imagery they are using. Yes, I know it's not all Sat imagery, some is simple aerial photography. Some of that imagery could be years old though. On the other hand, considering the money spent on this project, they may have paid for new and current actual sat imagery.
Swimming pools tend to be tiled, so my suggestion would be to tile in an ARPAT* pixelated camouflage style, and hide them in plain sight. Same could go for roof tiles of unauthorised buildings and extensions.
Here in the US, one County in state of Maryland tried to do something similar by looking for "impervious surfaces" and then tax people according to how much estimated precipitation run-off would then require flood control infrastructure. Locals quickly saw this for what it was and called it a "rain tax."
Apparently the aerial survey was examined by some sort of automated system that couldn't tell the difference between a paved surface and a gravel surface. This quickly turned the public against the idea, as there are many gravel driveways on the farms in the western part of the county. It goes to show that just because some idiot savant AI decides you have a swimming pool, doesn't mean one exists there.
"It goes to show that just because some idiot savant AI decides you have a swimming pool, doesn't mean one exists there."
True, but in the French case, it costs local Government the price of sending a letter to the home owner asking them to confirm if the have an unregistered pool or not. Now the onus is on the home owner to come clean and pay up, deny it and lie to the authorities or point out the authorities error. Either way, it's not costing much more for the local government to ask nicely rather than just send a bill and piss of all the false positive home owners.
The Maryland case you described sounds far worse and clearly DID piss of a lot of people.
"The software analyzed aerial images, scanning for telltale signs of pools such as blue rectangles in backyards"
"Arrays of solar panels could confuse the computer-vision software, causing it to flag false positives, and sometimes it would fail to detect swimming pools if "they were bathed in shadows or covered by trees."
"The software [...] was reported to have a 30 per cent error rate ..."
All in all not quite as good as the WW2 photo reconnaissance analysis done by humans on monochrome photos shot on fast flypasts by converted spitfires, often under fire (see R V Jones, Most secret war, Hamish Hamilton, London 1978 and many subsequent reprints).
I guess human examination of the pool photos would have worked just as well, but of course these days it's got to be done by 'AI'.
"I guess human examination of the pool photos would have worked just as well, but of course these days it's got to be done by 'AI'."
I wonder how much faster the image analysis is by computer, it spitting out likely candidates for humans to check, than for a a bunch of humans to manually check through 1000's or 10's of 1000's of images?
> Looks for blue rectangles. This is going to hit the homeless camps with all their blue tarps pretty hard.
Everybody (almost) in Maine lives by their blue tarps. Firewood piles by the score. Yard-sale stock. Spare-parts cars. Leaky roofs. Killing weeds. It is such a thing that there is even a dramatic play:
One Blue Tarp –by Travis G. Baker (on Amazon)
"One Blue Tarp is a comedy about a man, his tarp and the town that tries to take it away from him. David Stillman, a retired Mainer, has just replaced the old, worn out tarp that covers a heap of odds, ends and whatnots out in his yard with a brand new one. It ought to last ten more years but then he finds out from his neighbor that the town of Clara has recently outlawed blue tarps out in folks yards in an effort to spruce things up a bit and attract more tourists."
_____________
Pool or pond? Wetlands come all ways here. There's million-dollar architect-designed "ponds" up by the rich folks' cottage/mansions, and I suspect that is rolled into their per-acre tax base. OTOH I dug a low-spot that is wet half the year and dry this month, mostly a 1/8 acre eyesore but better than an acre of muck. Taxman doesn't care.
Remember that most of these "satellite" images are really low-flying airplanes. My new garage showed very clearly; heck, my old truck was easily found out front, not so much under trees. The garage had been appraised (before electrification!) but the truck's tax had not been paid for years. Shhhh!
"scanning for telltale signs of pools such as blue rectangles in backyards" - I'm seeing a sudden resurgence in interest in WWI style dazzle camouflage, painted over the bottom of one's pool to confuse AI.. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage)
Using imaging for tax assessment has been done for years in our part of California, and I'd guess its used widely, its just too convenient not to use. The French are just a bit late to the party.
Notice how this follows a typical line -- swimming pools are obviously a luxury item so are an object of envy, you're not going to be getting mass complaints because its only rich sorts have pools and they deserve taking down a peg or two. This is a bit of a trap because its really easy to spot swimming pools, they stand out, so you don't need sophisticated imaging to find them. Ten million Euros is also chickenfeed. They're after bigger game, that you can be sure of.
Incidentally, for those who aren't pool owners my advice would be -- "Don't". They're a nice idea on paper but you actually spend more time cleaning the pool and deck than you spend actually swimming in the things. They're also a homeowner liability. So unless you've got a really big yard (unlikely in England) or you swim a lot (or do a lot of work with scuba gear like the next door neighbor) forget about it. Work n the council to keep municipal pools open.
Your house must fit in with the local urbanism plan, and they frown on changing colours especially when it’s in view of historical monuments or listed buildings. Paint your house in the same tone, no problems. Paint it bright red when it was light grey, then you could have planning problems.
So you make your work declaration, that they have to approve or reject within a month for most “small” work, and a full planning permission for bigger stuff (like a full extension rather than a conservatory), where you need to describe what you are doing, and possibly require an architect to sign off on the safety of the plans and work.
As for pools, if they required masonry work (ie: built in ground in any way), it requires planning permission, a construction tax, and as it improves your property value, an increase of your annual housing tax. Same for extensions, as they increase your living space, and your housing tax is based on the surface.
The tax office can bang you for up to 5 years of unpaid tax on those changes, at an increased rate plus possibly a fine on top, and your local town hall may then take offense at the unplanned changes.
If you are lucky, get it declared properly on the land register if it didn’t break many/any planning rules and building regulations, otherwise they can make you take it down at your expense.
As a home buyer the last thing you want is to pay full market rate for a large property only to find that the waste water is borked, the foundations are not to code and it starts leaking and subsiding… and you overpaid by a LOT for a lemon - or worse find that extra extension goes over your property lines, you have to take it down at your expense, then try to find the previous owner and have it out in court… it happens more than you think… especially as French planning permission is not hard. Slow at times, but this sort of thing is done and dusted in a month…. So it’s just pure tax evasion really.
I’m fine with it if it as it will help keep people honest and protect buyers from bad workmanship on non-declared construction and renovation, and it’s been a long time coming.
Here due to similar Tax laws and costs of course, above ground pools are very popular as they are not taxable, it's a temporary thing much like a tent setup.
So you can put up your little pool have your fun, then take it down when you get tired of keeping it clean.
>So you can put up your little pool have your fun, then take it down when you get tired of keeping it clean.
Above ground pools can be quite large, as big as a typical in-ground pool. We used to have one before the in-ground was built. Once erected you can't put them away easily -- they do dismantle but the liner is single use only and its a bit expensive to use for a few weeks and throw away (not to mention the environment...).
The thing I like about above ground pools is that its really difficult for the neighbor's dog/toddler/whatever to fall into (assuming you keep the access ladder swung up when the pool is not in use).
So as some have pointed out the negative ROI. There is also a limit on the future use of this. I am also pretty sure that the Pandora papers etc, if followed up would net a whole lot more. especially since the legowrk has been pre paid.
But then large companies woul d have less to funnel back into certain hands....
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