I need to pay income taxes in France but I do not have a SEPA account. In France your tax has to be deducted from a European bank account and I live in the U.S so it is not easy to setup these accounts.
Does anyone know if I could pay the taxes from a Wise account ?
I understand that the Wise account has an IBAN number.
Why are you paying income tax if you don’t live in France?
@tim17
???
Many people do. It is why France has a separate tax department for non residents.
With respect your question comes across as very nosy!
To the OP, do you have an online account? If so I think you will find a section that informs you what payment methods are available to you.
.Online personal accounts for non-residents |impots.gouv.fr
i suspect Wise may not work because it does not give you a French IBAN.
Good morning!
I found the following on the French tax office website.
If I were you, I would give Wise a call and ask them whether they have signed up to “SEPA Direct Debit, with the SDD CORE (or B2C) option” (as referred to below).
Their euro account comes with Belgian bank details.
Here’s the link to the relevant section of the tax office website:
I am a non-resident and I have practical difficulties paying my taxes. Solutions | impots.gouv.fr
I am a non-resident and I have practical difficulties paying my taxes. Solutions
As a non-resident, you may experience practical problems in paying your taxes or in opening a bank account in the SEPA zone.
In all cases, you must ensure that the bank account details that you provided to the tax authorities are up to date.
All taxes and levies in excess of €300 must be paid online. These include income tax and social levies, residence tax, the public broadcast licence fee, property taxes, etc.
You can pay from your personal account at www.impots.gouv.fr, or via the direct online payment system (you will need your tax notice and bank details). You can also pay via your smartphone or tablet using the “Payer mes taxes” (Paying my taxes) section of the Impots.gouv app (available free of charge from Google Play, Apple’s App Store of Windows Store).
For income subject to advance income tax instalments, the levy at source from a bank account is the only means of payment provided for by law. Any other means of payment will be refused.
Please note that users must not under any circumstances attempt to settle the amounts owed by free payment or a traditional means of payment.
Important : payments by so-called “foreign” cheques (in euros or a foreign currency drawn on a foreign bank) are no longer accepted by government accountants.
You can also pay by euro-denominated cheque issued on a bank account held in Mainland France or in one of France’s overseas départements, regions and communities (DOM-COM), or by Pacific-franc-denominated cheque (CFP) issued on a bank account held in French Polynesia, New Caledonia, or Wallis and Futuna.
Please note : to pay online, you will need a bank account domiciled in France or the SEPA, which includes the Member States of the European Union, Great Britain (including Gibraltar), Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Monaco, San Marino, Andorra and Vatican City.
For each means of payment, your bank must be in compliance with the applicable European interbank regulations. Thus, some banks may not, although they are located in the SEPA zone, have complied with the regulations applicable to this direct debit and, as a result, the bank account details provided to the DGFIP will not be able to be used for income tax and social security deductions.
It is therefore advisable to check that your bank has signed up to SEPA Direct Debit, with the SDD CORE (or B2C) option.
As an exception, residents of the following States are authorized to pay by bank transfer if they are unable to open a bank account in the SEPA zone: Barbados, Cuba, British Virgin Islands, Iran, Kenya,
Thanks I saw that article on the French government website. We owe tax due to rental property that I and my brothers and sisters inherited in France. Assuming that I can open an account in a SEPA jurisdiction, can I use on account to pay each of the siblings taxes or does each sibling have to have their own account. I called WISE and they do transfers in euros but not direct debits. Any other recommendations for an online bank that accepts non-residents and is SEPA Direct Debit compliant… French banks do not appear to want to open accounts for US residents because of the reporting requirements to the US. FInCEN>
Rob LeChevallier
We inherited rental property in France. Under the US/French tax treaty, you have to pay tax on your French sourced income like real property. You then can claim a foreign tax credit on your US tax return. They don’t make it easy to pay their taxes as most French banks will not open accounts for non-residents or if they do they want to you apply in person. I am looking for an online bank that qualifies for the SEPA direct debit program.
Rob
I use OFX to send most of my payments from the US. Pretty sure they do SEPA.
Have a look at this from another forum.
Thanks for all the replies. I was finally able to pay the tax for 2023 through our property manager. I was also able to transfer funds using WISE account to the nonresident account at the Bank of France. However, the prélèvement requires a SEPA bank account for the tax authorities to make a monthly deduction so our transfer payments that I made for the prélèvement were rejected!
You don’t have to pay monthly…
Surely you can pay once a year when the Bill is issued??? At that point you make an online transfer for the full amount, from your French Bank to the French Govt Bank… ???
I have friends in US and I’m sure that’s how they’ve arranged things. He’s expected any day now, so I can ask him… 
Thanks. The French tax authorities rejected the prélèvement payment and sent me back a check in Euros! Go Figure.
Do you mean that you were not able to set up a prélèvement?
I do not understand why you say that they rejected the prélèvement payment. They would not reject a payment because it is not you that sends the payment for them to accept or reject, it is them that initiates it. All you do, is send a signed mandate to your bank authorising them to allow the tax office to take unspecified amounts from that particular account as and when.
But the tax office may decline to set up this arrangement with non French banks, because there is a process called Saisie Administrative Ă Tiers DĂ©tenteur or SATD that they frequently use to recover unpaid taxes, which involves the bank freezing the account until the payment is made. I suspect that the tax office may only deal with banks that participate in the SATD process.
Cheques have not been accepted by the tax office as a method of payment for at least 7 or 8 years. For a couple of years after dematerialised payment became officially obligatory for amounts above a certain threshold they continued to accept cheques but they applied a hefty penalty each time, to discourage people, and I imagine that they now no longer accept them at all.
Have you tried the normal options that Helenochka pointed you to? I believe that for one off payments using these methods, most bank cards are accepted whether French or not.
Not Strictly true.
In my experience I have a tax bill to pay each year which is paid over 4 installments from September to December but that excludes the monthly payments taken throughout the year which is a pre calculated percentage of what my tax bill is likely to be.
Yes I am French resident while the OP isn’t but until this is understood by the fisc then rules are rules?
My payments changed from one yearly payment at the end of the year to the four monthly payments from September last year. I presumed I must have triggered some sort of threshold because before I got my U.K. OAP the sums were relatively small amounts from bank interest whereas the tax on the pension is significantly larger.
Why would the fisc not understand that the OP is non resident? I would have thought that a US address on the tax form, plus the fact that the only income declared is a presumably relatively modest amount of rental income, would be quite large clues.
Hence my ? following my comment, it waa a question not a statement.