French government has started to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to spot undeclared swimming pools for additional tax collection. There is a additional property tax for homeowners calculated on the basis of rental value of property. So homeowner want to save money by not declaring swimming pools.
The project to spot the undeclared pools began last year, with IT firm Capgemini working with Google to analyze publicly available aerial photos taken by France’s National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information. Software was developed to identify pools, with this information then cross-referenced with national tax and property registries.
Initially the project scope is limited to 96 metropolitan cities only. But even in these areas, officials discovered 20,356 undeclared pools, according to an announcement this week from France’s tax office, the General Directorate of Public Finance (DGFiP), first reported by Le Parisien.
France has suffered from historic drought that has emptied rivers. In this situation private pool ownership is contentious in country.