Hello,
We’re trying to fill in our first French tax return, and have a question about double-taxation of bank interest.
We moved here in January 2019. We had some UK bank interest for 2019. We’ll have paid UK tax on some of this via our 2018-2019 UK tax return. But we haven’t yet done a UK tax return for 2019-2020 (and I’m not even sure if we’ll need to).
So, should we be trying to claim a French tax credit on the UK interest received between 1 January 2019 and 5 April 2019? (I’m not sure how I work that out!) Or will we be able to retrospectively claim back the UK tax?
Thanks!
Did you tell HMRC that you had left? As in theory you should only have done the 2018-2019 UK tax return up to the date you left in December/January as a split year treatment. And then you declare everything in France from then on. Unless you have a government pension of UK rental income you no longer need to do a UK tax return.
I would have thought the best is to claim the tax credit here, so you need to declare the tax you’ve paid. Whoever you got the bank interest from should be able to tell you what the amount of interest was from Jan -Dec (if not obvious on your statements) and then you can work out what the tax on that was. If of course you paid any? As depends on whether it fell within your tax free allowance.
Like you, in our first year we ended up claiming credit for tax paid in UK bit so long ago I can’t remember which box it went in. Maybe someone else will know.
When we paid withholding tax in UK on an account interest after we had informed HMRC via the Form France-Individual and claimed it back from HMRC.
IIRC such interest does not form part of the Double Taxation treaty and you must claim it back from UK as France has no interest (no pun) in it.
Cool - thanks!
We did declare to HMRC that we had left. (We even tried to declare to the local French tax office that we had arrived, but they said there was nothing to do until we came to this first tax return!) What I hadn’t realised was that we should have excluded the Jan-Apr interest from our 2018-2019 UK tax return.
HMRC Form & Notes
You might find the attached useful.
#HMRC DT_France_notes.pdf (251.5 KB) #HMRC DT_Ind_France_01_20.pdf (265.3 KB)
The form asks for your French tax number. I believe that you can only obtain this once you have completed your first French tax return (but may be best to check this).
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How odd, I’m sure we got credit for it. If I can rouse myself from my comfy chair I’ll have to look at old tax return to see if I’m mistaking it with some other UK income we paid tax on.
And yes you get your TIN when you’ve done your first tax return.
Up until a few years ago I was told by HMRC that it was up to the bank to pay my interest gross but I got nowhere with them. The advice from France was that if you had already paid tax on interest in the U.K. you only needed to declare the net received on your French tax form so although you paid twice it was a bit less than twice the UK tax. As the amounts were so little that’s what I did. Within a couple of years the system in the UK changed and Barclays paid the gross interest into my account so that solved that problem. I thought that all U.K. banks had changed at the same time.