Why do people get hung up on passports being stamped? Unless you’ve being living under a rock for 20 years, your passport is machine readable and gets scanned every time you cross an international border outside of the EU.
I take it the stamp is intended for the traveller’s benefit, so that a traveller can see at a glance what date they crossed the border and work out how long they have left, and also so that the traveller cannot try to dispute the date with the border officials. As you say, border control doesn’t need to look at the stamp.
I guess the way to look at it is, better to have a stamp and not need it, than not to have a stamp, forget what date you arrived and overstay by accident.
As I mentioned last week, mine didn’t get scanned arriving at Toulouse airport from the UK. The border guard just opened my passport, ignored the TdeS inside, stamped it and returned it. Didn’t even look at me.
Thank you for the reply. The CdS application was indeed very late in the year. As for many, the absurd ultra-thin Brexit deal provoked the CdS application. We bought the place in March, but couldn’t get over till late June because of the travel ban. Definitely no France-acquired income, but still need to do a form declaring UK pension I guess. Just received a tax number by email, so I can now register my online account and take it from there.
I do not know exactly how al this works but is an electronic record of the border crossing not made automatically by the airline when you checkin to board your flight?
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There’s also backup in case of later dispute of the electronic record. Which is why, if I had a CdS, it *would* bother me that my passport was stamped incorrectly.
I totally agree with you. I didn’t mind at all. I wonder i f the guard fe lt the need to explain because he’d been challenged before.
It’s great you didn’t mind but in the grand scheme of things that’s not really what matters. My question is whether it’s correct or not, not whether it’s reasonable. The explanation given was certainly reasonable, but I wonder what the legal text actually says with regards to this. Everything I’ve ever seen said was that if you have the attestation and can reasonable show you’re resident your passport should not be stamped. Since Jan 1st there has been some back and forth to whether you can use other evidence, but assuming the attestation is reasonable evidence that you are resident, and given until the end of the year you don’t legally need to have the CDS in your hand, what he said sounds a reasonable argument, but not a reasonable application of the rules as I understood it, although as I say the burden will be on what the text actually says, and frankly I can’t be bothered to search it at this time 
If he’d been challenged before (and I appreciate that’s hypothetical) perhaps it’s because he’s not practicing the letter of the rules but his interpretation of them, especially given even people with the CDS have had passports stamped too. There really does seem like a basic lack of training around this as at this point there shouldn’t be variation of the rules.
Anyway, just some thoughts, I don’t really have a strong view either way.
France is getting tougher on cartes de séjour and visas : this is from the summer and the latest news is large reductions of visas and cartes awarded to people from the Maghreb. No reason why non-regular/resident Brits won’t be next…
The tint of their skin and the relative depth of their pockets?
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Some years back a Brit sold his French home. To all intents and purposes he was Resident (or so we all thought) but the Notaire asked for proof…
(I’ve no idea why, unless something made him wonder about a person who had homes in UK and France… )
Anyway, the Notaire did ask for his Impots sur la Revenue document…
Now this should not have caused any problems, since I’d explained how to do a Declaration (and presumed he had done the necessary).
However, for reasons only known to himself, said Brit had not done the Declaration…
The outcome of this was that the Sale cost him a lot of money as the Notaire classed the house as his Maison Secondaire and deducted a lot of CGT.
I think he wept… I know he’d transformed the place into a very desirable residence and was selling it for good money… but…
Maybe Notaires will make a habit of asking for that document… who knows.
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Unless he had receipts none of the work he had done would have counted against the plus-value 
It’s good reason to think twice about getting work done on the “black” as the ouvriers sometime offer.
He was selling the house as his main residence, which would have attracted zero CGT… but… he wasn’t really Resident in the true sense of the word… and it cost him dearly…
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And it never occurred to him that the notaire would check, rather than simply take his word for it? Because perhaps he wasn’t the first person ever to try that trick?
That is almost funny.
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I don’t know why he never completed the French Declaration of Income during the years he was here… and thus omitted to get into the system correctly…
I’ve used his sorry tale as a warning to others, on more than a few occasions… but, after that, it’s up to them…
And it never occured to him that the core function of a notaire in house sales is to collect tax!
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A friend has just posted this info:
Just a quick note of warning, all recent CdS applicants/French residents post Brexit, make sure you are up to date with your tax returns. This is something I have just read on one of the W.A. sites. It appears “les Impôts” are now following up on all applications…
As an aside to a (now closed) post regarding people getting WARP cards who shouldn’t have, I know of a couple of people (10 year cards) who have been asked by les impôts why they haven’t made their declarations. Squeaky bum time for them as they are now have to explain why they have not done them. It seems that now most have got their cards the dots are starting to be joined…
I can see some huge fines being implemented shortly… avoid penalty by filing your returns asap.
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Their first clue to this happening should have been all the French government’s online portals having a single sign-on function.
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I have only just put my popcorn supply on a high shelf expecting the ‘squeaky bum time’ to not happen so quickly in regards to the CDS fraudsters … It looks like i may need extra supplies 
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I know people who came here and expected that it would be just like England.
They were waiting for the notice that they needed to have an MOT on their car.,
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