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French tax officials use AI to spot 20k undeclared pools (2022)

theguardian.com

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Re: French tax officials use AI to spot 20k undeclared pools (2022)

#31

Post by rahen »

cm2187 wrote: post #27
pyrale wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Taxes is what sends children to school, pays for hospitals and funds the infrastructure everyone uses. People love to hear about AI breakthroughs that could transform education or health, why should they not be happy about this? I have many doubts about the actual technical solution, but I wouldn't discard the work because it's for taxation purpose.

Taxes are pissed away in France in gigantic useless bureaucracies, useless projects and vote-buying redistribution, to the point that core state functions (police/justice, army, education or healthcare system) are paradoxically starved of funds and dysfunctional. Sadly the only way to curb this spending incontinence seems to starve the state of revenues.

Why "sadly"? Starving it also gives it less power, and more power and freedom to the individuals. This is even truer in France.

Re: French tax officials use AI to spot 20k undeclared pools (2022)

#32

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

In Amsterdam they've been using drones for this kind of things.

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 :)

Re: French tax officials use AI to spot 20k undeclared pools (2022)

#34

Post by BrandoElFollito »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #9

"AI" 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

It's not only Capgemini. Most of French digitalization is horrendous.

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.

Re: French tax officials use AI to spot 20k undeclared pools (2022)

#35

Post by cinntaile »

darkr wrote: post #22
pyrale wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Taxes is what sends children to school, pays for hospitals and funds the infrastructure everyone uses. People love to hear about AI breakthroughs that could transform education or health, why should they not be happy about this? I have many doubts about the actual technical solution, but I wouldn't discard the work because it's for taxation purpose.

From my understanding they paid CapGemini €24M for this project in order to net €10M in taxes.

That's 10M extra per year. You pay property taxes each year.

Re: French tax officials use AI to spot 20k undeclared pools (2022)

#36

Post by pyrale »

darkr wrote: post #22
pyrale wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Taxes is what sends children to school, pays for hospitals and funds the infrastructure everyone uses. People love to hear about AI breakthroughs that could transform education or health, why should they not be happy about this? I have many doubts about the actual technical solution, but I wouldn't discard the work because it's for taxation purpose.

From my understanding they paid CapGemini €24M for this project in order to net €10M in taxes.

The $10m comes from about 10% of France's territory that was used as an experiment.

Re: French tax officials use AI to spot 20k undeclared pools (2022)

#37

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

andybak wrote: post #14
denhaus wrote: post #2

legitimately the shittiest, most boring, and most unimaginatively dystopian use for AI I have ever seen.

It's people that can afford pools on their property. They can afford to own property. I'm not shedding many tears here. 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.

It costed more to create the AI with capgemini then they recoverd.

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?

Re: French tax officials use AI to spot 20k undeclared pools (2022)

#38

Post by _Microft »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #28
TMWNN wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of that will be fixed costs. It won't cost nearly so much the next time.

...when will the next 20.000 swimming pools be done?

Another commenter pointed out that having a pool influences the property value and thereby tax, so they should be able to collect the tax yearly, not just once.

Re: French tax officials use AI to spot 20k undeclared pools (2022)

#40

Post by orwin »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #9

"AI" 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

Capgemini and Atos are the worst that happened to French tech. Atos managed to turn me from liberal to communist when in comes to public services and general interest. I would rather deal with slow, 'lazy' bureaucrats than greedy little shit who can't own their mistakes. At least, when the corruption is within the government, it can't be that huge and blatant. A state secretary can say 'it would be easier to get that subvention if you used Atos Bullion' and fear nothing.

By the way, Bullion software support is them emailing redhat support, but more expensive.

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