Letter from tax office re siret number

[Allen]

Hi,

After filling in our tax from and delivering to our local tax office (Charente-Maritime 17) at the end of May, last week we received a letter from them which basically is saying that we need to get a Siret number even though we only have a gite and earn less than €23k, but it is more than 50% of our income. Have been trying to find out why as we have been doing it for 10 years - the tax office just say 'they (whoever they are!) have started at the coast and have now instructed our local tax office that everybody needs to register their gites with a siret number. When we stated that we earned less than €23k per year and should still be on the 'non-professionnel' regime she insisted that no matter what circumstances everyone had to register at the C of C and she would not back down from this. Can anyone clairfy this situation? Also if we disagree with it who do we approach. Would be grateful for any advise.

[EuroTrash]

I don't think you can disagree, I believe that it has always been the law that if a gite is your main source of income it must be registered.

Assuming you live in France, which you don't state.

How are you getting your healthcare at the moment? If you're on CMU or an S1, that's not right. Everybody who has an earned income in France must pay cotisations to the French social security on their earned income in France. If you have another job or business, it's fine to run the gite as a sideline without paying additional cotisations since you're already affiliated and paying your cotisations on your main source of income. If not, and if the gite is more than 50 per cent of your total income, you must register it and pay your dues. You can't claim to be inactive, or retired with no earned income, when in fact most of your income comes from running a business.

Not sure about 'everybody' registering their gite, AFAIK nothing has changed, they have been told to tighten up, and that is an over-simplified answer made to keep you quiet, but who knows.

Personally I would play along and definitely not start making waves in case 'they' start looking back over previous years, and reassessing those.

[Allen]

Thank you for your advise. We do live in France, each year we fill in a form for our healthcare and we are in the CMU base but we do not pay cotisations as our earnings are too low but we do pay a prelevement sociale to the tax office which is about 15.5% of the 29% of our earnings. The assurance maladie put us in the the CMU base which is different to just the CMU which is for people on benefits so we assume that this is correct... It is just we are rather worried as we have heard that once you are registered with a siret number the charges you have to pay are very high and as we only earn well under the €23k per year and we pay all our other taxes whether we will be able to afford to stay here.

[EuroTrash]

"we do pay a prelevement sociale to the tax office which is about 15.5% of the 29% of our earnings"

This sounds like the exact amount that you would pay if you registered your gite under the auto entrepreneur scheme and got your siret number and kept everybody happy.

When you fill in your form for healthcare, do you tell them that you're running a gite business?

Could be wrong but I think you are paying the correct amount but you're paying it to the wrong caisse. In which case, registering and getting your siret number will make practical no difference to your finances, it will just mean filling in different forms.

[EuroTrash]

Ignore my last post it was total rubbish. On AE you would pay around 15% of your total turnover, wouldn't you.

Still, nothing's for free and it's the same rules for everyone, you just have to grin and pay up.