Diving in the pool may be less relaxing this year for some taxpayers. More than 120,000 owners of undeclared pools were caught up by the patrol. They have received or will receive in the coming days an email or a letter from the Directorate General of Public Finances inviting them to comply with the rules. Upon receipt, they have thirty days to declare their pool on impots.gouv.fr via the "Real Estate" service. And fill in the date of completion of the basin, its surface, its characteristics ...
For these taxpayers, the transaction is not neutral. Because a swimming pool, which must normally be declared within ninety days of its construction, is taxable under property tax if it is more than 10 m2 and cannot be moved without being demolished (in-ground, semi-buried or above-ground wooden pools for example).
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"We expect additional tax revenues of the order of 40 to 50 million euros," said Jérôme Fournel, director general of public finances, on April 13, at the launch of the income tax declaration campaign. Because, in addition to the new taxation this year, the tax authorities can make an adjustment up to four years back. The bill on the property tax this year could thus amount in the fall to 375 euros on average per owner of undeclared pool. A jackpot for the municipalities concerned, the result of the innovative land operation launched in 2021 by the tax authorities.
House extensions in the viewfinder
To track down these "oversights", Bercy called on Cap Gemini, which developed with Google a software to exploit the aerial views of the National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information (IGN) to compare them with cadastre data. The anomalies found are then checked by the tax officials.
The experiment started in October 2021 in nine departments (Alpes-Maritimes, Var, Bouches-du-Rhône, Ardèche, Rhône, Haute-Savoie, Vendée, Maine-et-Loire and Morbihan) had already uncovered 20,356 undeclared basins. Nearly 10 million euros were recovered in autumn 2022 by the municipalities concerned via the property tax.
And the tax authorities do not intend to stop there. "We are gradually tackling more widespread subjects such as extensions, small houses built without a permit..., explained Jérôme Fournel to us at the beginning of May. This requires a little more time for the algorithm to be of the same quality as for swimming pools, with a very low error and failure rate. »