Notice to all those who are used to renting their property through word of mouth, offering their services such as giving lessons or emptying their cupboards on Vinted or LeBonCoin... Be vigilant!
If, for two years, the tax authorities have been testing an automated search system on social networks to track down fraudsters, based on content freely accessible on online platforms, the finance law for 2024 has just considerably strengthened investigative powers tax authorities on the internet.
Beware of your new follower on Facebook or Instagram
The legislator now gives public finance agents the possibility of carrying out, under certain conditions, pseudonymous investigations on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) or TikTok to identify fraudsters.
According to senators Claude Raynal and Jean-François Husson, authors of the report on the fight against tax fraud presented at the end of October 2022, these platforms are “important vectors of hidden work and therefore of VAT or tax fraud on income for example.
For these new measures to be effective, however, it will be necessary to wait for the publication of the decree implementing these new prerogatives.
Once this text has been published, you will certainly have to be wary, for example, of a customer who insists on paying "black", or even of his next Tinder date who could well be a tax investigator.
Incognito investigations
With the new situation, tax agents with at least the rank of public finance controller and specially authorized will be able to go on social networks to find information useful to their file and even create profiles to exchange, under a false name, with taxpayers suspected of tax fraud.
However, the creation of a pseudonym can only be implemented if the investigation is carried out for the purposes of research or the observation of serious breaches:
- failure or delay in reporting in the event of discovery of occult activity or, regarding the development tax, in the event of construction or development without authorization (CGI art. 1728, 1-c);
The installation of a swimming pool without authorization for example;
- deliberate inadequacies of declaration or linked to an abuse of rights or fraudulent maneuvers (CGI art. 1729);
- failure to declare accounts or life insurance contracts or similar held abroad or trusts, leading to an increase in duties (CGI art. 1729-0 A, I);
- disposition of property or sums of money relating to an illicit activity, giving rise to a presumption of income (CGI art. 1758, last al.).
As Maître Emmanuel Laporte, lawyer at the Court, explains to us, “we do not yet have any perspective on this new practice”.
We will have to wait for the publication of a decree implementing the 2024 finance law on this point, to better understand the concrete modalities of this new repressive arsenal.
According to him, three sensitive subjects will certainly be the subject of particular attention by the tax authorities, namely:
the identification of undeclared lucrative activities likely to have resulted in omissions in terms of profit, income or VAT taxes;
the characterization of a false tax domiciliation abroad likely to establish deliberate declaratory insufficiencies in France with respect to income tax and social security contributions, the IFI or gratuitous transfer taxes;
the observation of obvious discrepancies between the apparent personal situation of a taxpayer (lifestyle, assets) and their tax returns, likely to suggest various intentional reporting inadequacies.
Intensification of the exploitation of mass data from platforms
The finance law for 2020 launched, for a period of 3 years, an experiment aimed at authorizing the tax and customs authorities to collect and exploit, by means of computerized and automated processing (artificial intelligence), content freely accessible on websites for search for elements that could reveal the existence of certain breaches of tax and customs rules.
Thus, until now, investigators could only verify content that was “obviously accessible”, that is to say, content requiring no registration and no connection to a platform such as Leboncoin, Vinted, Airbnb.
To facilitate the task of investigators, this experiment is extended for a period of 2 years by the finance law for 2024. The text specifies that agents can now collect and use data relating to public interactions between users, such as exchanges between people offering tobacco for sale and those expressing an interest in such an offer.
This would include all public posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or even TikTok, which can only be accessed after creating an account.
The experiment will however be carried out under current conditions until the day after the publication of the expected decree for the application of the new text, and at the latest until December 31, 2024.