I have been living in France and working in Monaco now for over a year. When I first joined my companies HR Dept informed me that I needed to contact my local SIP dept and inform them if my status so I pay taxes. They sent some forms asking me my earnings, status, for the current tax year as well as previous ones. I filled them in and returned them. I never heard anything more. I wrote to my local SIP office every couple of months asking them how much tax I owe them, but they never give me any answer. I am therefore in the dark. Some expats tell me that when you move to France you don’t pay tax in your first year. I am concerned that one day SIP will ask me to pay a big one off bill and want it paid straight away. Any advice from anyone please?
You submit your first tax return in the May of the year after you arrive in France.
Ok. I arrived June 2016. I informed the SIP office in Menton, submitting the tax forms they sent me in September 2016. last wrote to them in May and august 2017 to get an update, but no feedback from them yet.
You should have made your first tax return in May 2017. You can get the forms that you need from your local tax office or download them from
Don’t write, visit your local tax office and speak to someone, they are usually very helpful.
You need to complete a tax return for the period from June to 31 December 2016. The deadline for this was in May 2017. I suggest you visit your local tax office with all the correspondence you have received/sent and explain the situation. They are usually very helpful. I understand that you may be able to pay your tax in installments depending on your situation. As you have been in France for longer than 6 months you will probably be considered resident here (again, this depends on your particular situation) so you will need to declare all of your worldwide income. Best of luck getting this sorted out.
Hi mandy. I already completed the tax return they sent me last year and returned it to them. I haven’t heard any more from them even though I regularly write letters to them asking what the situation is. Just surprised after completing all their forms and regularly following up they haven’t asked for any money!
The tax forms have already been submitted to them last year, but there never seems to have been any conclusion to it, I.e. You owe this much tax to us. I can’t really visit my local tax office because I have not been able to take any holidays from work because it is my first year of employment. They are only open when I am in work. They were very good at responding to my letters last year, but now they seem to have gone quiet.
I don’t know what forms they sent you in September but the annual tax exercise always happens in May. As others have said, if you arrived in June 2916 your first tax return was due in May 2017. The French tax year is the calendar year. Whatever it was you filled in last September, it wasn’t an annual tax return. You cannot declare your income between Jan 1 and Dec 31 2016 in September 2016.
They sent me forms in which I had to declare all my revenues for the current tax year as well as all the way back to 2013-2014. Filled them in and returned to the SIP office. They never sent me any further forms to complete even though every couple of months I contact them to ask them if I owe them any taxes. Do you know the name of the tax form that you are meant to fill in? If you do I can ask make reference to it when I contact them next. They never sent me one to complete this year even though I declared my situation to them last year when I arrived and regularly asked them for updates.
It’s called a Déclaration des revenus. Normally the tax office send them around March/April. If you have all your reference numbers then maybe you could print the form (see below) and take it with you to the tax office with all your other documents. Hopefully you will then only have to visit once. I expect you are only going to get this sorted out if you go there. Surely your employer can spare you for one day considering how important this is.
Hi mandy. Yes that is the form I filled in for SIP last year and returned to them. Do they not send the same form out again automatically to residents each year to complete? I never got one if they did and I have been in contact with them regularly for this last year.
Usually they do send you the forms once you’ve been through the annual tax exercise once and are on their system. But basically it’s your responsibity to make sure you submit them on time, so if you don’t receive them, you need to go and collect a set. During April there are public media announcements and posters all over the place to remind people.
Never saw anything to be honest during April. I will ask them if I need to complete these forms or whether the forms I completed last year are sufficient.
To assess whether you need to pay taxes on your 2016 income they need to know exactly what income you had between 1.1.16 and 31.12.16. I don’t see how you could have provided this income to them in September 2016… you don’t know for sure until the year has ended.
I don’t know why they asked for information in September. The French tax calendar is very rigid. For paper declarations, the forms are revised each year (so you need to use the correct form, you can’t use eg a 2015 form to declare 2016 income), they become available from early April and you submit them in May. For people who declare online, which most people do, you receive an email telling you when the window is open, and you have a couple of months in which to do your declaration, and then the window closes. Tax notices are sent out from July. After that the exercise is closed, except for resolving queries. The schedule runs like clockwork each year. You can only declare outside of the window in special circumstances, by agreement with the tax office.