France using AI overlords to find undeclared swimming pools

Ubbquittious

https://www.pepperoni-restaurant-cannes.com/how-the-french-tax-authorities-track-undeclared-swimming-pools/

I did not know until today that there was such a thing as an undeclared swimming pool but this takes the biscuit.

So after all your work and expense of building the damn thing and paying to fill it with water you have to pay the government annually for the privilege of holding onto it. There was a time when people were generally encouraged to go forth and try to improve their lives but now its becoming the norm that governments persistently nickle'n'dime you for precisely how much fun you're having.

Strumms

In thought this was a joke but several reliable news sources running it…

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62717599

taxing swimming pools, ok what next ? Not enough that tax would be paid on the purchase and installation of the pool and assorted and associated accessories, filters, covers, chlorine etc ?

i suppose the billions of aid being fûcked at Africa out of the EU coffers…and the Ukraine situation….has to be partially recouped..

the solution the French have.. ‘shakedown people for having a bit of a leisure / fitness amenity..a ‘swimming pool’… shake your people down for owning and having stuff…

Probably get to the point where if a family owns two cars a 25% extra surcharge in tax gets applied on car two.

what a scummy time to be alive.

Cookie_Monster

Nothing new there, Brazil do the same, there was a piece on them using similar tech recently.

sameoldname

Imagine having to pay tax on an asset. What has the world come to?

Padre_Pio

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119540351#Comment_119540351

Imagine that paying recurring tax is becoming normalised.

I get that we pay motor tax to "maintain the roads", but paying recurring tax just to own something that does not use public land or public services is sickening.

It's as if there was no option to declare a car off the road. If you own it, you pay tax. Property tax is another scam altogether.

Strumms

Car tax - road upgrades, maintenance, traffic lights, road markings etc…the tax goes towards something.

owning a pool tax, ffs.. stop the world and let me off.

At least Dîck Turpin wore a mask..

France is already an expensive country, now you can’t enjoy relaxing and keeping fit by swimming in a pool but the cûnts want that taxed too..! What a time to be alive. Swimming, in a pool, on land you own, TAX IT !!!

Atlantic Dawn

We should use AI to check for undeclared scrap yards I know of 10 within 20 minutes of my home yet Fingal County Council shows a complete blind eye, one is 50 foot from a NCT centre and visible on Google Maps for near 10 years.

sameoldname

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119540357#Comment_119540357

The average swimming pool takes over 60,000 litres to fill and can lose 2,500 litres of water to evaporation a week. Where does all that water come from and how does it get to the property if not for publicly funded water infrastructure? That's water that doesn't need to be wasted, all of which needs to be stored, treated and pumped. €200 a year extra for the privilege isn't exactly a scandal. And before somebody says it, most pools are in cities not the countryside, so the vast bulk of them are not being filled from a private well.

The Ging and I

Its also known as Property tax. Unlike Ireland where property tax is based on sale value the French take in all aspects of a property. off road parking , garages , tennis courts , how many toilets and baths etc.

vegandinner

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119540384#Comment_119540384

They pay water charges, they’ll be on a meter and would pay around €300 if they had to refill the pool from empty

brokenangel

Think that’s bad, people in ireland want to tax houses if someone doesn’t live in them

2011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119540364#Comment_119540364

"France is already an expensive country......"

I disagree, I found it to be much cheaper than Ireland.

In France people tend to work a 36 hour week, retire at 60, they pay far less in rent, insurance and in November last year, froze gas prices at October 2021 rates and also limited electricity prices from increasing by more than 4%.

https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/France-extends-energy-price-cap-measure-to-the-end-of-2022

I would just see the swimming pool tax as an extension of property tax.

Former Former Former

As usual people aren't reading the article, just going off on rants based on their own rage.

There isn't a tax on pools. Having a pool increases the value of your house and thus increases your property tax.

If the headline was "France uses AI to detect rich people evading tax", would ye still be as upset?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119540357#Comment_119540357

Motor tax is based on the pollution levels of the motor and the tax goes into the same pot as all other taxation, it is not specifically for roads

i think we really need to work a little harder on educating ppl on the concept of a social cost

seems like every second poster here these days fancies themselves as some rugged individual frontiersperson whom the govt/society in general should thank for existing

if a couple hundred quid a year to run a swimming pool *in a country where property tax is well established" is your "ooooh de gubbermint" meme of the day then i dont know that you had much to contribute tbh

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119540536#Comment_119540536

exactly the same posters would be upset, ninety percent of americanised economic debate posters have a slavish unthinking reaction to defend low taxes on wealth as if they were ever going to be the beneficiary of the wealth

lads: most ppl are in fact beneficiaries of the tax, ye are arguing against a better world. thats the facts.

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119540351#Comment_119540351

Pay tax to build it, pay tax to fill it, then pay tax every year to be allowed hold on to it. It's just state-imposed begrudgery at this stage. Property tax is a scam I don't know how people here didn't protest harder when they were bringing it in here but I suppose at least they're not checking for unauthorised swimming pools here yet we must count our blessings.

Seth Brundle

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119541563#Comment_119541563

Which taxes in your view are not a scam?

Property tax is effectively a wealth tax so surely a good thing? Unfortunately, in Ireland we've chosen a poor metric for deciding it (assumed value).

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119540536#Comment_119540536

Except that headline would be misleading. Swimming pools are way more popular in France than here and I been to some houses that had one and they were anything but posh

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119540366#Comment_119540366

Fat chance of FCC upsetting the Pavee lads. Not worth the hassle.

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119541578#Comment_119541578

I don't really believe in paying every year just to hold onto your own stuff. I have to pay 80 quid every few years to renew the license for my shotgun, just so I can hold on to it and not use it even once, that annoys me too. Paying tax if I have money coming in is fair enough but not the government coming in to try and asset-strip you because there has been a dip in your income. Property tax really is a terrible tax and in a lot of places it's just used to enforce the poshness of an area (not making enough money to continue living in the up-and-coming gentrified area? get out and make room for someone who is.)

banie01

Tracking undeclared swimming pools and indeed development of any kind. Isn't just to ensure that any development levy or property tax is paid. It is far more useful as a means of identifying people who are in general, non compliant with tax codes. Spending on a swimming pool is a large outlay on a luxury item. If it isn't correctly declared and assessed it is a shorthand means of assessing the the likely Tax compliance of the property owner and is used as a means of insight along with a huge range of other tools to assess the need for audit.

Similar happens in Ireland albeit not with swimming pools. The reconcilation of every card terminal in the state with every debit and credit card issued in the state is possible currently. The level of granular detail available to Revenue and processed via Watson AI and self developed software is huge.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119541603#Comment_119541603

thats why it is usually best to read past the headline.

dotsman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119541603#Comment_119541603

But it still increases the price of the property which is the point.

Seth Brundle

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119541637#Comment_119541637

I don't really believe in paying every year just to hold onto your own stuff. I have to pay 80 quid every few years to renew the license for my shotgun, just so I can hold on to it and not use it even once, that annoys me too. Paying tax if I have money coming in is fair enough but not the government coming in to try and asset-strip you because there has been a dip in your income.

Property tax is a stable tax and not as affected by economic dips such as when a lot of people become out of work. Not having these types of taxes made the need for austerity measures a decade ago more necessary.

Property tax really is a terrible tax and in a lot of places it's just used to enforce the poshness of an area (not making enough money to continue living in the up-and-coming gentrified area? get out and make room for someone who is.)

If it were done right, it should not be affected by an area and would be based on something tangible such as total area, number of bedrooms or whatever but by basing it on market value makes it somewhat unfair. A mansion in Leitrim would potentially have a lower property tax band than a three bedroom house somewhere in Dublin.

However, you are completely wrong to believe that property taxes are not a good thing and allow those with a higher value asset to contribute more i.e. a wealth tax.

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119541757#Comment_119541757

Its only stable because it forces people who are making feck all to continue paying. Basically loading the incompetence of governments that can't save up for the bad times onto the ordinary punter. Just because you have a roof over your head doesn't mean you have lots of money to spend

dxhound2005

There is a separate wealth tax in France, as well as property tax. The Yellow Vests will be very happy with the news about the swimming pools.

Ray Palmer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119541685#Comment_119541685

Technically possible but actually impossible. The banks can't give the gardai/revenue wholesale information. There is no infrastructure in the software to do it and laws preventing it. It is funny to hear people talk about what is possible in some sort of sci-fi way. They couldn't do it secretly without alerting hundreds of people who wouldn't do it either way.

Victor

France has a wealth tax. It means they get money from rich people who avoid paying income tax. If there was no wealth tax, other taxes would be higher.

"Car tax - road upgrades, maintenance, traffic lights, road markings etc…the tax goes towards something." - we don't have a car tax, we have a motor tax that applies to fossil fuel vehicles. It gets paid to the Local Government Fund for general expenditure and water services, it is not spent directly on roads.

banie01

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119542185#Comment_119542185

It is not just possible it is in practice already. I'm not guessing here and I have posted regarding it previously. Search is still borked, but when I get to a laptop later today I'll link to a previous thread on here where it was discussed.

Off the top of my head TCA 1997 and subsequent finance acts grant broad power for revenue to collect and collate terminal data. Terminal data is batch uploaded to revenue on a regular schedule primarily as a VAT and Profit control measure but the data itself can be tabulated at a the single transaction level and 3ach transaction married back to individual payee. That functionality is available to Revenue but is rarely used outside of CAB.

Edit

This thread touches on the powers available to Revenue and the acts underpinning them.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117950018#Comment_117950018

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117950130#Comment_117950130

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117950180/#Comment_117950180

Further clarification as to the powers that revenue have regarding transaction reconciliation and review. There isn't even a need for a warrant for Revenue to

Strumms

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119541563#Comment_119541563

totally , layers of tax to own something on your land that will enable your enjoyment of life as well as health as fitness.. ‘tax it’

an ‘undeclared swimming pool’…

Like the CAT tax here, capital acquisition tax… get left a property abroad, the government here want a slice of that aswell…

seems that dipping honest citizens isn’t only limited to Ireland.

cost of living in most of France IS high. Any metric set up to measure this will agree.

what next are we going to be conditioned into believing is fair and appropriate, what next dipping measure,

two car family tax ?

two holiday a year tax ?

Being a measure in the EU no reason why our government won’t adopt it.