PRESS RELEASE

15/11/2023

Citizen-driven report

DETECTION OF TAX FRAUD

BY INDIVIDUALS

In 2022, the Court of Accounts held its first public consultation to gather proposals for

investigations to enrich its work programme.

Following nearly 9,000 registrations and 333 online

contributions, six topics were investigated in 2023.

The detection of personal tax fraud is the

fourth citizen-driven report to be published.

The success of the second campaign in 2023 (over

20,000 participants and 622 contributions) demonstrated the public’s interest in this tool.

The new

themes selected by the financial jurisdictions will be presented on 3 January. The citizens’

contributions at the origin of this survey justified this proposal by "the need to check that

the administration has effective means of detecting tax fraud by individuals", a sign of the

French people’s attachment to tax civic-mindedness and the principle of equality before the

tax. In accordance with the request made to the Court, this report deals only with taxes paid

directly by individuals. In 2022, this amounted to more than €160 billion. Effectively

combating tax fraud is not only one of the conditions for tax compliance, but also a

budgetary issue, given that the total amount recovered by the tax authorities after an audit

amounted to €14.6 billion in 2022, of which just over a third concerned private individuals.

Implementing a strategy to detect tax irregularities

While it was largely based on the systematic three-yearly audit of the largest taxpayers in terms

of income and assets, the scheduling of tax audits - the only way of identifying and punishing

fraud - has undergone a ‘technological revolution’ over the past decade. The digitisation of

virtually all tax processes and the increase in the volume of data available to the tax authorities

have led them to develop powerful automatic processing tools to identify inconsistencies and

anomalies in tax returns. Nearly a third of tax audits are now based on risk analyses fed by mass

data processing (data mining). Other experiments, such as the innovative land management

system that relates elements declared for property tax purposes to public collections of aerial

views, bear witness to the growing use of artificial intelligence technologies. The DGFiP is also

committed to stepping up the collection of information, for example from "tax informants", to

identify sophisticated fraud and new fraud schemes. As technologies designed to detect tax

irregularities in individuals are potentially intrusive, they have resulted in new provisions to

protect taxpayers’ rights, as the Constitutional Council has tightened the scope of the tax

authorities’ powers. The cross-referencing of mass data can be used as an inspection aid, but

can never be used to automatically identify fraud.