France has overtaken the UK in the number of millionaires, paper or otherwise, living within its borders. So I learned from reading this week UK newspapers online here in the South of France in the second half of August 2023. The data was used a spring board for another round of prognostications of doom and gloom about the UKs standing in the world, and some begrudging respect for the machinations of Macron, who the Brits somewhat churlishly typically tend to lampoon as a Napoleon want to-be, short of stature and overbearing in arrogance. It was pointed out in the Telegraph, with its never ending crusading for lower taxes and less regulation, that Macron and his government had reduced barriers to commerce in France, as measured by the ‘ease of business’ metric beloved of economists and their fellow travellers. I as a recent arrival have had some interactions with French authorities. I’ve bought, registered and insured two vehicles. I’ve rented a house. I’ve set up a micro enterprise. Now a few months later, I look back and struggle to remember the details of processes undertook, an indication, and a lazy one at that, that it weren’t so traumatic, all in all. Setting up a company was the most challenging of the lot, and it was the one with a challenging timeframe. And the reason for the time pressure was the opportunity to participate in Summer artisan markets taking place in Sete. Now my wife is the jewellery maker and sometime marketeer, but being a Canadian and lacking a Carte de Séjour, she could not provide the paperwork needed. So up stepped EU Paddy. France has a system of a single sign-on identify for its public services, but to get it you need official status namely a tax number or a social security number or a registered Postal address. I tried to go via the Postal address route, not having the other two, but no go, for some reason my proof of address did not fit the bill. I fumbled around in the dark for a week or two chasing lines of enquiry down internet dead ends. I went to the local mayor’s office, a part time operation sharing space with a part time post office, and got a gruff one line direction to take my company forming enquiries to Beziers, the regional administrative centre. One morning after the obligatory period of fumbling I lit upon the website of a company that provides services related to company formation https://www.legalplace.fr/). I filled in their online form (thanks once again to Google Translate) and very shortly afterwards was invited to provide some additional information, and within a couple I had a micro-enterprise created in my name. Now the same company offers company transfer services and once I have my wife’s Carte De Sejour, the intent is to transfer it to her. With a micro enterprise of limited turnover the tax will be a 30% social security contribution to be paid quarterly. This gets you health insurance. I just recently sent, somewhat belatedly, my birth cert and passport copy to the Caisse Primaire d’Assurance Maladie aka CPAM aka l’Assurance Maladie of Herault to register for health insurance but also to receive a social security number which it appears I need to register with the tax authorities, which I need to do to pay my social security contributions, but also to receive a tax identification number which I can then provide to Etrade and have them reverse the with-holding tax they have deducted from my account once I informed them of my move to France. Everything is fucking connected. Welcome to the cyber reality of tax affairs in the 21st century. The noose is set and set to tighten. No wonder big business is weaponising the less educated to rail against the WEF, globalisation, climate change, the rootless elite and you name it – they don’t like joined up global coordination between governments. That is not in there revenue shifting, tax minimising interest. Might even be that my interests in this case align with theirs….but, nah, fuck em. So rather than wait for my French tax identification number I called Etrade and reversed my address to Ireland. Which will sort out my tax withholding issue, but then I was told that a 90day hold had been placed on my trading account due to some dodgy trade I apparently had managed in my ignorance to effect. I don’t believe that’s the case as my margin trading rights were removed months, allowing me to only trade on my cash account, which means buying, not shorting, shares with money in your account. Not much room for nefariousness there. Anyway systems be fucking up. Tis their nature and the balance of probabilities. Mugs law – if you don’t understand something it will eventually fuck you over. Competence the key to surfing the web of life. So this is the governmental website I need to register with for taxation purposes – https://www.autoentrepreneur.urssaf.fr, the one that I am need a social security number for.
I mean I never created a company before but it felt comparably pretty easy. Here’s the bill –
France has overtaken the UK in the number of millionaires, paper or otherwise, living within its borders. So I learned from reading this week UK newspapers online here in the South of France in the second half of August 2023. The data was used a spring board for another round of prognostications of doom and gloom about the UKs standing in the world, and some begrudging respect for the machinations of Macron, who the Brits somewhat churlishly typically tend to lampoon as a Napoleon want to-be, short of stature and overbearing in arrogance. It was pointed out in the Telegraph, with its never ending crusading for lower taxes and less regulation, that Macron and his government had reduced barriers to commerce in France, as measured by the ‘ease of business’ metric beloved of economists and their fellow travellers. I as a recent arrival have had some interactions with French authorities. I’ve bought, registered and insured two vehicles. I’ve rented a house. I’ve set up a micro enterprise. Now a few months later, I look back and struggle to remember the details of processes undertook, an indication, and a lazy one at that, that it weren’t so traumatic, all in all. Setting up a company was the most challenging of the lot, and it was the one with a challenging timeframe. And the reason for the time pressure was the opportunity to participate in Summer artisan markets taking place in Sete. Now my wife is the jewellery maker and sometime marketeer, but being a Canadian and lacking a Carte de Séjour, she could not provide the paperwork needed. So up stepped EU Paddy. France has a system of a single sign-on identify for its public services, but to get it you need official status namely a tax number or a social security number or a registered Postal address. I tried to go via the Postal address route, not having the other two, but no go, for some reason my proof of address did not fit the bill. I fumbled around in the dark for a week or two chasing lines of enquiry down internet dead ends. I went to the local mayor’s office, a part time operation sharing space with a part time post office, and got a gruff one line direction to take my company forming enquiries to Beziers, the regional administrative centre. One morning after the obligatory period of fumbling I lit upon the website of a company that provides services related to company formation https://www.legalplace.fr/). I filled in their online form (thanks once again to Google Translate) and very shortly afterwards was invited to provide some additional information, and within a couple I had a micro-enterprise created in my name. Now the same company offers company transfer services and once I have my wife’s Carte De Sejour, the intent is to transfer it to her. With a micro enterprise of limited turnover the tax will be a 30% social security contribution to be paid quarterly. This gets you health insurance. I just recently sent, somewhat belatedly, my birth cert and passport copy to the Caisse Primaire d’Assurance Maladie aka CPAM aka l’Assurance Maladie of Herault to register for health insurance but also to receive a social security number which it appears I need to register with the tax authorities, which I need to do to pay my social security contributions, but also to receive a tax identification number which I can then provide to Etrade and have them reverse the with-holding tax they have deducted from my account once I informed them of my move to France. Everything is fucking connected. Welcome to the cyber reality of tax affairs in the 21st century. The noose is set and set to tighten. No wonder big business is weaponising the less educated to rail against the WEF, globalisation, climate change, the rootless elite and you name it – they don’t like joined up global coordination between governments. That is not in there revenue shifting, tax minimising interest. Might even be that my interests in this case align with theirs….but, nah, fuck em. So rather than wait for my French tax identification number I called Etrade and reversed my address to Ireland. Which will sort out my tax withholding issue, but then I was told that a 90day hold had been placed on my trading account due to some dodgy trade I apparently had managed in my ignorance to effect. I don’t believe that’s the case as my margin trading rights were removed months, allowing me to only trade on my cash account, which means buying, not shorting, shares with money in your account. Not much room for nefariousness there. Anyway systems be fucking up. Tis their nature and the balance of probabilities. Mugs law – if you don’t understand something it will eventually fuck you over. Competence the key to surfing the web of life. So this is the governmental website I need to register with for taxation purposes – https://www.autoentrepreneur.urssaf.fr, the one that I am need a social security number for.
I mean I never created a company before but it felt comparably pretty easy. Here’s the bill –
TVA stands for taxi sur le valeur ajoutée aka VAT, sales tax, consumption tax, whatever you call it it’s always there. In France it’s set to 20% for most stuff.
So once I had my company setup and had me a SIREN number which is your company reg and a SIRET number which is your company reg plus 5 digits that identifies your corporate offices -if you had 3 offices you’d have one SIREN plus 3 SIRET numbers – I started to get some interesting correspondence. The same day I received a letter containing a speeding fine, I got an officious looking letter informing me that as a company owner I needed to pay €200 Euros to do something or else I would be liable for a fine of € 5000. I was like shit. I hate letters. But something seemed a little off. It was like that time we got phone scammed into giving my wife’s one time password – I know I know, trés stupid! We were never quite sure what the problem with the account was that was generating this need for the call we were having to resolve the proproblem. Same with this letter. I couldn’t quite figure out, even allowing for the fog of administrative French, what I was paying for. Anyways so I go online type in the heading for the letter and lo and behold a direct match, to a website run by an upstanding pagan sleuth who line by line interrogated the contents of the letter and finally proclaimed it a scam. Apparently, if you are an organisation of a certain size you need a sign to display your corporate credentials. That’s what I would have gotten for my €200. Scammers, eh! The second correspondence triggered by my step into the shiny skyscraper of company owner capitalism was altogether of a more whimsical, French and savoury nature – it was a letter – now received twice – from the local musicians guild pointing out that live music has been statistically proven to improve the sales performance of retail and encouraging me to consider the excellent services of a musical nature that members of their guild in this region were sure to provide. The organisation of arts into collectives, those collectives having ties to regional government, those ties providing the funding to support an administrative layer to these guild, who in turn generate these marketing programs, all seems very French. And laudable and doomed. It’s one reason why countries like France are accused of holding onto practices that are deemed to stymie progress, because the past worked.
TVA stands for taxi sur le valeur ajoutée aka VAT, sales tax, consumption tax, whatever you call it it’s always there. In France it’s set to 20% for most stuff.
So once I had my company setup and had me a SIREN number which is your company reg and a SIRET number which is your company reg plus 5 digits that identifies your corporate offices -if you had 3 offices you’d have one SIREN plus 3 SIRET numbers – I started to get some interesting correspondence. The same day I received a letter containing a speeding fine, I got an officious looking letter informing me that as a company owner I needed to pay €200 Euros to do something or else I would be liable for a fine of € 5000. I was like shit. I hate letters. But something seemed a little off. It was like that time we got phone scammed into giving my wife’s one time password – I know I know, trés stupid! We were never quite sure what the problem with the account was that was generating this need for the call we were having to resolve the proproblem. Same with this letter. I couldn’t quite figure out, even allowing for the fog of administrative French, what I was paying for. Anyways so I go online type in the heading for the letter and lo and behold a direct match, to a website run by an upstanding pagan sleuth who line by line interrogated the contents of the letter and finally proclaimed it a scam. Apparently, if you are an organisation of a certain size you need a sign to display your corporate credentials. That’s what I would have gotten for my €200. Scammers, eh! The second correspondence triggered by my step into the shiny skyscraper of company owner capitalism was altogether of a more whimsical, French and savoury nature – it was a letter – now received twice – from the local musicians guild pointing out that live music has been statistically proven to improve the sales performance of retail and encouraging me to consider the excellent services of a musical nature that members of their guild in this region were sure to provide. The organisation of arts into collectives, those collectives having ties to regional government, those ties providing the funding to support an administrative layer to these guild, who in turn generate these marketing programs, all seems very French. And laudable and doomed. It’s one reason why countries like France are accused of holding onto practices that are deemed to stymie progress, because the past worked.