Tax advice please

Banking & Financial Tax & Social charges
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I’m a retired UK citizen who is tax resident in France with taxable income in both the UK and France, and so files tax returns in both countries. My South African wife is taxed with me on our French income, whereas we are taxed separately on our income from elsewhere.

I’mseeking advice on the following :neutral_face:

In the last month my wife has sold two paintings for a total of a few thousand euros. One was to an American collector through the Saatchi Gallery website and is liable for UK tax (providing, Ithink, she sells another ten in this finacial year!). The other sale was in France and made me wonder, that as my wife isn’t making sufficient to be a registered micro-entrpreneur, is there any way in which her considerable costs (paint, canvases, brushes, studio heating and lighting etc.) can be tax deductible in the way that they would be in the UK, if she was a self-employed artist?

If you’re curious about Sonja’s work, it can be viewed at :

https://www.sonjabritz.com/

And, should you be tempted to buy one…:

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I don’t know what you mean by this. If you earn one euro a year then technically you earn suffient to be registered as a micro entrepreneur.
If she is not registered as a professional artist then she doesn’t have the right to sell her work. I have no idea how you would go about declaring money that you shouldn’t have earned (the tax office will ask for her siret number etc). It’s a bit surprising she made a sale as galleries normally check that exhibitors are en règle before they will accept their work.

This looks like a useful site F.A.Q - Questions générales que se posent les artistes amateurs, F.A.Q.

2. Je suis artiste amateur, ai-je le droit de vendre mes œuvres ?
Non, pour vendre en toute légalité, il vous faut respecter 2 règles pour ne pas vous mettre hors la loi dès le 1er euro perçu :

  • Il faut déclarer vos revenus au fisc

  • Et déclarer votre activité socialement auprès des services administratifs de sécurité sociale de La Maison des Artistes. Que cela soit votre activité principale ou non, la vente des oeuvres est considérée comme un acte commercial et donc comme un revenu. D’autant plus que les revenus accessoires existent dans notre régime de sécurité sociale.

Pour le détail exact des conditions et des démarches à effectuer, reportez-vous aux questions traitées ci-dessous|

then be warned that buying work from an unregistered artist is just the same as using an unregistered artisan, you could find yourself in trouble. Best wait until the lady is registered and has her siret number.

Sorry an’ all, but don’t shoot the messenger.

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Interesting, that is…the world complicates itself at every spin, but I wonder… why did they pick “micro entrepreneur” for my tax things, when they know perfectly well I sell paintings.
Not in France, except occasionally, but in Japan. Everyone ever connected to every euro I get, knows that perfectly well.
I can’t argue with anyone and tell the tax dept they’ve got everything upside down or backwards.
Never found out what siret numbers are for, but shows in France ask for them. So I’ve got one.

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My bad - I just read the site I linked to and I see that artists can be micro entrepreneur these days. So I took that bit out of my post!
When auto entrepreneur was first created it did exclude artists but there have been a lot of changes since then and that’s one I missed.:upside_down_face:

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Gosh! Wonderful!! Thank you for your rethink!

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may be its a perception thing?
If you presented at the tax office with a striped top, beret and a pencilled on moustache with a paintbrush tucked behind your ear they might form a different view but a seller of paintings per se might not be regarded as an artist but more a seller of paintings…

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That’s exactly what they are for. You get one when you register as a business, be it as a professional artist or a sparky or an accountant, and it is a way for third parties to check your registration and reassure themselves that they are dealing with someone who is properly registered and accountable, and not on the black.

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But that’s exactly what I do. Tache too. Got to look like a Real Artist and never be mistaken for one of the lower orders. Do you know that artists count as being in the top layer of Brit society? So sucks to everybody. And remember your manners.

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I do like the image of Jeanette with a pencilled on moustache and a beret.
Sorry though, I was talking rubbish and artists can be micros.
Just to clarify - there are artists and there are sellers of paintings, they are two different categories with different percentages applied. So it’s not a distinction the tax office should be making based on your sartorial choices.

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I must be quiet, or ticked off for too many posts…:grin:

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Thanks very much Anna, that’s really helpful information.

The siret number is interesting as my wife has shown in three French, state supported galleries without this requirement being mentioned.

Nevertheless, it looks like we’ll both need to register, but in the meantime can route future sales through Saatchi’s UK, where each sale generates a form for the tax authorities that the artist completes and returns.

Apropos micro-entrepreneur minimum income, my understanding was that there is a threshold below which an enterprise is not considered valid and thus one is unable to become a micro-entrepreneur simply to acccess cheaper medical assurance.

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@DrMarkH re your wife’s portfolio, the paintings look wonderful to me even in miniature, I can almost smell their wateriness and vegetability! Enjoyed reading the artist’s explanatory statement on provenance and inspiration too.

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Thanks Peter,

The artist is now asleep , but I’ll pass on your kind words tomorrow.

The rest of this post may well belong elsewhere, but as my original art and tax query has been so thoroughly and succinctly answered, maybe I can continue on the former subject

Our house is several metres from the banks of the Lot and (fortunately) several more metres above it. Consequently, we look down on the river, day after day, and season after season. As a result of this degree of direct observation, the paintings have a sound foundation of the artist’s visual understanding of her subject, which is very different that to gained working from photographs, where ones understanding is shaped primarily by what the camera has been able to record.

However, not withstanding the above, I’ve recently had a very interesting experience with a camera and the river. An airline pilot friend has just bought a drone with a hi-resolution camera and together we’ve been photographing the Lot from above. I’m the art director and he controls the drone (it seems to work better that way round!).

My surprises were threefold: firstly, a skilled operator can precisely manoeuvre this drone to within a couple of centimetres; secondly (very obviously, and yet not) unlike traditional cameras, it enables you to see through a monitor, views that are not directly available to the naked eye; lastly the high resolution and tripod-like stability of the drone enables one to see in a new way.

I have some amazing photographs taken from a metre above a weir (which one wouldn’t be able to take from a boat, or a plane, or even a helicopter) where the hi-res/hi shutter speed has frozen incredible minute detail of waterweed flowing in the tumult of the weir, and which I’m now having blown up to a metre and a half across.

So, one might argue that the traditional subject of photography was what was visible within the direct field of vision (even though this might be enhanced or magnified through lenses, microscopes etc.) Similarly, traditional aerial photography either used a photographer in a balloon (Nadar, Paris 1863!) or later a man in an aeroplane, but the camera remained an extension of the cone of vision.

I think (please correct me…) that it’s only with satellite based photography that this really changes, but as far as I understand this is a fairly automatic process in contrast to the traditional one of the photographer choosing the ‘decisive moment’ to press the shutter. Also, astronomical photography is digitally enhanced and colourised to a dispiritingly high degree, that through interpolation software can turn a small group of pixels into a possible/probable galaxy.

The above reflections make me wish I was still writing papers that enabled me to travel all over the place to interesting academic conferences. If anyone’s read this far, thanks for your interest and tenacity!

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Re micro entrepreneur. There is an earnings threshold below which you may be liable to pay additional healthcare cotisations, so in effect you would be regarded as an inactif with a hobby business and you would be charged cotisations on your unearned income. That’s probably the threshold you’re thinking about. But you need to be registered to undertake any professional activity or make any income, “from the first euro” as the texts keep quoting. Legally you can’t even do any marketing or have a professional website without a siret number. There is a list of what “mentions légales” must by law appear on every professional website, and your siret number is one of them.

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Anna, thanks again for your assistance, we’re both now en route to acquiring seret validation. So I’m sure everything will be kosher by the time we file our next French return.

However, we’ve had a lot of recent dealings with French curators, arts organisations and artists who have described seret as, ‘n’est important pas’, so there’s obviously a large cultural black economy.

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They can’t really have been French :wink::laughing:

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For your next Worldwide Income Declaration here in France… you can always use your “we are all allowed to make one mistake in our Tax Affairs” excuse, if you should have done things differently in the past. :wink: Provided such a mistake was honestly made, the French Tax Officials cannot penalize you (I think that’s what the law says).

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Thanks Stella,

I’ve received a lot of very generous and helpful info in response to my original post, but unfortunately no one has suggested any French equivalents of the various tax deductible expenses that can be off-set when self-employed in the UK, and which was the subject of my original post.

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Might be worth going to your local Tax Office here in France and asking them the question. They may be able to help or they may point you in the right direction… :wink:

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The mechanism for claiming expenses against professional earnings depends entirely what business structure you are registered under. Micros declare turnover and the fisc automatically apply a flat rate abattement at a fixed % of turnover. On réel you will have kept accounts and recorded expenditure against the correct code, etc. But there is no mechanism for claiming professional expenses if you are not registered to engage in a professional activity because that is not a situation that should ever arise, so there is no provision for it.
You are asking a non question really, and I think that is as close to an answer as you will get. It’s like “If you want to get to there, don’t start from here”.
Once you are correctly registered you will simply follow the rules for whichever regime you chose, to offset expenses.