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Catala: Moving towards the future of legal expert systems

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Abstract

Around the world, private and public organizations use software called legal expert systems to compute taxes. This software must comply with the laws they are designed to implement. As such, a bug or an error in a program that leads to tax miscalculations can have heavy legal and democratic consequences. However, increasing evidence suggests that some legal expert systems may not comply with the law. Moreover, traditional software development processes mean that legal expert systems are difficult to adapt to the continuous flow of new legislation. To prevent further software decay and to reconcile these systems with the growing demand for algorithmic transparency, we argue that there is a need for a new development process for legal expert systems. This new system must be built to comply with the law, in particular the GDPR. It must also respect democratic transparency. For these reasons, we present a solution built by lawyers and computer scientists: Catala, a new programming language coupled with a pair programming development process.

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Notes

  1. Source: Internal Revenue Manual.

  2. For a more comprehensive description, see Victor (2013).

  3. Source: representatives from Ernst & Young, PwC, Deloitte and KPMG at the “Machine Intelligence and the Future of Professional Tax Services” panel during the 2020 UC Irvine Tax Symposium.

  4. Source: French Commission for Accessing Administrative Documents, notice n\(^\circ \)20181891, 2019.

  5. Any disagreement should correspond to a bug in the old system.

  6. Source: France Inter, Jan. 2018.

  7. Source: France Inter, Jan 2016 Hundreds of subscribers were threatened to lose their pension rights.

  8. Source: press release of the French national pension agency (CNAV), May 13th, 2009.

  9. Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. Guidelines on Automated individual decision-making and Profiling for the purposes of Regulation 2016/679, 3 October 2017.

  10. Article 21, Loi n\(^\circ \)2018-493 du 20 juin 2018 relative à la protection des données personnelles.

  11. Art. 83 (5) (b), GDPR : “Infringements of the following provisions shall, in accordance with paragraph 2, be subject to administrative fines up to 20 000 000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher : (...) (b) the data subjects’ rights pursuant to Articles 12 to 22”.

  12. Loi n\(^{\circ }\) 78-17 du 6 janvier 1978 relative à l’informatique, aux fichiers et aux libertés, dite «informatique et libertés » , telle que modifiée par la loi n\(^{\circ }\) 2018-493 du 20 juin 2018 relative à la protection des données personnelles.

  13. Art. 47 (2) (2), Loi informatique et libertés : «le responsable de traitement s’assure de la maîtrise du traitement algorithmique et de ses évolutions afin de pouvoir expliquer, en détail et sous une forme intelligible, à la personne concernée la manière dont le traitement a été mis en œuvre à son égard » .

  14. Art. 4 (1), Directive on Automated Decision-Making.

  15. Art. 6 (3) (1), Directive on Automated Decision-Making.

  16. Source: author’s private discussions with public sector French legal expert systems programmers and publicly available beta.gouv.fr blog post (Feb. 2020).

  17. Source: information personally transmitted by the French Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) to the authors.

  18. This behavior can lead to privacy violations when the data is covered by tax secrecy for instance.

  19. Article L.311-3-1 of the French code on relations between the administration and individuals.

  20. Source: French decree of June 22th, 2020.

  21. https://www.astree.ens.fr/

  22. www.openfisca.org.

  23. Source: beta.gouv.fr evaluation of the project.

  24. Pierre Catala is, together with Lucien Mehl, a pioneer of French legal informatics, having authored works such as Catala et al. (1974). Beware, the name Catala is typographically close to the name of the Catalan language written in Catalan : Català. However, we believe that the very narrow scope of our programming language is not prone to set any confusion given the existing wide influence of the Catalan language and culture.

  25. www.catala-lang.org.

  26. https://catala-lang.org/en/examples/family-benefits

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France

    Liane Huttner

  2. Inria, Paris, France

    Denis Merigoux

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  1. Liane Huttner
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  2. Denis Merigoux
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Huttner, L., Merigoux, D. Catala: Moving towards the future of legal expert systems. Artif Intell Law (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-022-09328-5

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