Drones to find swimming pools and illegal works in a thousand Spanish municipalities

Drones to find swimming pools and illegal works in a thousand Spanish municipalities

Hacienda will comb the country with a technology that launched Montoro in 2013, and with which it regularized three million constructions

  Anyone who has carried out works outside their homes without declaring them to the Treasury may be 'hunted' with the drones that will be combing this year a thousand Spanish municipalities in search of illegal constructions such as land extensions, swimming pools, terraces or garages, according to the Budgets that the Government presented three weeks ago in Congress.

The decision to use new technology such as these flying objects to fight against fraud was taken in 2013 by Cristóbal Montoro's team, under the PP Government. Since then, more than three million buildings with buildings that did not have the necessary permits from the almost 77 million properties inspected to date have been found through aerial photos, according to the data collected by the General Directorate of Cadastre. This volume of undeclared constructions shows an average fraud rate of 4% in all of Spain, although there are regions whose citizens are more prone to it than in others.

Of course, this time Hacienda has not published in which municipalities the real estate registry will be carried out, which would allow to know if they will focus more on the areas where it was shown that there were major irregularities. Then it was the Balearic Islands in first position, followed by Extremadura and Andalusia.

From the Ministry explain that there is no list because they have to analyze first the data collected in the last five years. They will study all the information and then they will see that municipalities have to submit again to this plan, often at the request of the city councils themselves.

Thus, the team of Minister María Jesús Montero takes over from the previous Treasury cabinet and will work with this system to detect fraud. Being the first time, they have budgeted 1,000 analysis municipalities, according to the accounts included in the Budgets, which is 13% of the total, a number slightly lower than what the PP did with the analysis of 1,272 localities in 2017 and 2018 But Hacienda explains that that thousand is an estimated number taking as reference what has been done in recent years, but "does not mean that it will be exactly that number". In favor of Montero's plan, it is a priori that a greater number of troops will be dedicated this year than in the past, in total 1,474 people, 88 more than in 2018.

"The planned work plan aims to ensure the agreement between the cadastral description and real estate reality of the municipalities managed by the Cadastre," the text states. And those territories are all less Basque Country and Navarre, which as provincial communities remain outside the analysis of the Treasury.

The most found by the Treasury in its records are undeclared constructions, extensions and rehabilitations, reforms and swimming pools. The Balearic Islands was the community where there were more irregularities, since 6.5% of the inspected properties had some irregularity. The least, Asturias and La Rioja, where 'alone' were 2% and 2.1%. At the top are Extremadura (6.3%), Andalucía (6.1%) and Canarias (5.7%).

Requirements for the flight
The Treasury sends a notice to the owner of the home, explaining the situation and giving him one last opportunity to pay the corresponding tax for carrying out the work. And there are many times when the problem has been more administrative than fraudulent, as there are many citizens who declare the new construction to their municipality but not the Cadastre for lack of information. But if the fine is confirmed, it also affects the allocation of income in the IRPF, so the following income statement should reflect the finding.

Regarding the legality of flight of these drones, Santiago Carmona, general secretary of the Official Association of Aeronautical Engineers (COIA), explains to this newspaper that "they can not fly freely", but they have to fulfill all the requirements established by law. It depends if it is day or night, if you fly over an area with an agglomeration of buildings or an open forest, etc.

Thus, the expert explains that in a day flight in a city the drone should have a maximum weight of 10 kilos and the trip is limited to the visual range of the pilot. In addition, it is necessary to request permission from the Interior ten days in advance and the operator (Treasury or the service subcontracted) must submit the Aeronautical Safety Study to the State Aviation Safety Agency (AESA). In turn, the 'commander' must be enabled by AESA.

This list of requirements shows that it is not easy to do so. What is the motivation then? Carmona defends that the drone inspections are "much more versatile" than the photos obtained by satellite, as well as that the image quality is greater. At the cost level they are not comparable because the price depends a lot on the suppliers.