France has used technology to add 10 million Euros in taxes. They started scanning aerial surveys, think Google Maps, and found over 20,000 swimming pools that were not registered. Each of these was discovered using Google’s cloud processing to find blue rectangles, cross reference taxation databases, and hit the sunbathing scofflaws with steeper taxes. More amazing, is that reflects about 10% of the country, and they intend on pursuing this further. Governments will clearly be looking at this waterfall of cash for their own methods to scrape more revenues together, I’m sure.
Computer eyes in the skies make real estate tax evasion in France much harder.
Found at arstechnica.com
