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

theguardian.com

101–110 of 174 posts

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

#101

You can without a doubt take this even further and train it to detect all sorts felonies. The felonies will mainly be simple ones that perpetrated by the lower and middle class. Builder working without a bill? Crosscheck income with an country wide average and their spending history. Nailed. Waitresses working without paying tax? Crosscheck size of establishment with formally employees. Nailed. Of course, this not on…

Why shouldn't crimes perpetrated by lower and middle class be persecuted? The rich already pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes and then society excuses lower and middle class persons from paying their small share of taxes.

>The rich already pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes

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...

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

#102

You can without a doubt take this even further and train it to detect all sorts felonies. The felonies will mainly be simple ones that perpetrated by the lower and middle class. Builder working without a bill? Crosscheck income with an country wide average and their spending history. Nailed. Waitresses working without paying tax? Crosscheck size of establishment with formally employees. Nailed. Of course, this not on…

Why shouldn't crimes perpetrated by lower and middle class be persecuted? The rich already pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes and then society excuses lower and middle class persons from paying their small share of taxes.

why do you think the rich pay a "disproportionately" large amount of taxes

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

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Swimming pools are definitely something middle class people can afford. Just not in a city centre, obviously.

Damn, how much does it cost to have a decent one in France/Netherlands/where you are. Hope you guys realize you are wealthy.

At the lower end all you need is a tarp, shovel, a hose, and probably a pump to filter the water. You can also build one out of wood (we did this when I was with the scouts, and the biggest cost concern was the price of the water).

It doesn't need to be expensive; not every swimming pool has to be a large and fancy.

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

#105
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, how much does it cost to have a decent one in France/Netherlands/where you are. Hope you guys realize you are wealthy.

At the lower end all you need is a tarp, shovel, a hose, and probably a pump to filter the water. You can also build one out of wood (we did this when I was with the scouts, and the biggest cost concern was the price of the water). It doesn't need to be expensive; not every swimming pool has to be a large and fancy.

[dead]

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

#106

It’s interesting they have time for this, but going after the big fish is too much. In the Netherlands we lack the capacity to go after tax evasion using non profits. Untold millions go to waste every year, but they have enough capacity to go after small fish and their “fraud”. ( https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toeslagenaffaire , this is a big one where thousands of families were sent into 30k-150k debt for a “mistak…

Also: how much did this system cost to build? There's a real chance it was more than the €10 million it brought up in revenue thus far, and total revenue is expected to be "up to €40 million" once it's rolled out nation-wide. Even without taking in to account the costs, €40 million is basically nothing considering total taxation revenue is in the hundreds of billions.

At some point "fighting fraud" just becomes a cost-ineffective jihad rather than something meaningful.

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

#107
post #36
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The article says "The public finance authority DGFiP said the AI programme would now be rolled out nationwide, potentially leading to €40m in new taxes on private pools in 2023".

So total revenue is not that significantly higher than €10m.

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

#108
> A typical pool of 30 sq metres would be taxed at about an extra €200 a year.

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.

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

#109

You can without a doubt take this even further and train it to detect all sorts felonies. The felonies will mainly be simple ones that perpetrated by the lower and middle class. Builder working without a bill? Crosscheck income with an country wide average and their spending history. Nailed. Waitresses working without paying tax? Crosscheck size of establishment with formally employees. Nailed. Of course, this not on…

Tax authorities already use Benfords law to detect unusual returns.
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