French Bank Letter

[Hetts1965]

Hi

I have received a letter from Credit Mutuel asking me to complete a form with NIF etc however, I am not registered in France for tax, do I use my UK UTR. Someone told me if I don;t complete this form then I am committing fraud and can be imprisoned and someone else said just ignore it! Which should I do as I really cant understand all of it !

Thanks

[andyh4]

These are standard type letters coming from banks all across Europe. (In our case we have had them from UK, French and German banks)

You fill in your UK UTR number - making sure that it is clear that it is a UK number.

Failure to reply could lead to your account being frozen, pending money laundering investigations - but I know of no case where this has actually happened.

[Loiseau]

Welcome to the forum, Hetts.

Yes, as Andy says, this is a regular occurrence these days.

[NormanH]

What is a UTR number?

[andyh4]

Unique Taxpayer Reference = TIN Taxpayer Identification Number - perhaps not exactly the same since formats might be slightly different, but certainly meeting the same criteria.

[NormanH]

So in France it is the

numéro fiscal..?

[mint]

oui, c'est exact

[YCCMB]

Speaking personally, I think we had one of these letters about a year ago. Actually, Mr Betty and I got one each.

We decided to bin them as there were a number of "issues", all of which, individually and cumulatively, made the whole exercise a bit daft.

Such as telling us both that our French account would be reported to each of our tax offices....so if we have €100 in our French joint account, our bank would report €100 for each of us, not €50 each.

Or such as advising HMRC that we might have a tax liability on such money which was transferred to France from money already earned and taxed in the UK.

So far, ignoring such idiocy has not caused either of us to be lead away in handcuffs, nor have we spontaneously combusted

[Judith]

We were told when hubby ignored them, and then they contacted him, 'cos they made a booboo of something else, that a new European law says that they have to send them, 3 times, but cannot force us to fill them in ... and after three attempts they tend to give up,  Bit of a farce, really, as anything like that can easily be gained by co-operation between the different tax offices if need be.  And are they really going for the small fry like most of us are, probably not. 

[Doodle]

My holiday home neighbour has just received one of these letters and asked me what to do. Looking at the letter they had enclosed a short summary in english and an english form to fill in. I said put your national insurance number on the line 'My Tax Indentification No. is'

This may be of interest - sorry don't know how to make it a live link. Mrs KG

https://www.oecd.org/tax/automatic-exchange/crs-implementation-and-assistance/tax-identification-numbers/UK-TIN.pdf