Social Charges Refund - Interest not paid

[Evianers]

Well, we finally received the refund of Social Charges on investment income for 2012, 2013 and 2014, a mere 2 years and 3 months after submitting our claim.

However, they have not paid the interest and we shall have to start another round of emails with the tax people. We would prefer to accurately calculate what we think the interest

should be and then put that figure to the tax office rather than them

just come up with any old figure. To do that we have some questions which we hope someone can answer:

Q1: Over what period is the interest calculated? Is it a) from the original date of payment of the social charges to the date of refund or b) from the date of our claim to the date of refund? Hopefully the anwer is a) !

Q2: The interest rate is 0.4% per month. Is this applied as simple interest or compound interest? In our case compound interest would give an extra 48EUR. However, we expect that the tax office uses simple interest...

Q3: Is the interest taxable? We would assume that it is unless there is an exemption for interest on overdue refunds - unlikely in our view but you never know.

Many thanks in advance for any helpful answers.

[AnOther]

Whether you class it as helpful or not is for you to decide but given your experience thus far and the general the difficulties in dealing with authorities in France personally I'd be asking myself if, for a modest €48, it was really worth the potential aggro.

[EuroTrash]

"Q3: Is the interest taxable? "

I don't know, but I do know that when as a business you charge clients late payment penalties, you don't have to declare this money.

Have to say I agree with An0ther - I'd be glad I'd received the refund and could now put it to bed.

[Evianers]

The 48 € is only the difference between Simple and Compound interest. What they actually owe us is more than 500 € based on simple interest if our calculations are right. The extra 48 € would bring the total close to 600 € - definitely worth fighting for!

[richard51]

Don't know, but turning the 48 euro argument on its head, I'd go for the compound interest calculation and let them argue!

[parsnips]

Hi,

    When I got my repayments (for 2011 - 2014 inc), the statement had a box top left of the  front page giving the roll numbers and the years and other guff , and also a line saying "interets moratoire  oui/non" ticked oui : but  no interest had been included; I advise the OP to do what I did - check that the same is on his paperwork and simply send an email with a highlighted copy of the statement, saying that no interest had been received by me , and was there a problem ,     The interest was promptly paid .   Having received a total repayment of well over   6000€ plus interest , I wasn't too concerned with the minutiae of compound v simple .     

[Evianers]

Thanks Parsnips. We have just checked the reimbursement statement and it does indeed show OUI next to Intérêts moratoire for each of the three years.

We will follow your sound advice and send them a copy of the statement and ask them where the interest has got to. We will also tell them how much we think it should be.

Wonder if one can claim interest on a delayed interest payment.......?!

Thanks again, much appreciated.

[Daft Doctor]

Hi, we had exactly the same experience, but persistence did pay off in the end. We received our social charges refund in December 2016, but as with the OP, no interest was forthcoming. I sent a few emails with the award letter attached, asking for payment of the interest due, copied to both the tax office and local trésorerie. The tax office told us that it was the trésorerie who were responsible for making the calculation and the payment, so I sent a further email to them in July last year, at which point the manager got and touch. After an apology, the payment was eventually made in September, and it was in line with the figure I expected. It might be worth you going in to see them in person, but I'd try emailing the local trésorerie first and see what happens....

[Evianers]

An update and some good news.

We are in Dept 74 so we emailed the main tax office in Annecy with whom we had dealt when resolving our claims for refund of Social Charges. They quickly contacted our local Trésorerie who in turn did the interest calculations for 2012 and 2014 and sent us a copy of those calculations. Those agreed with what we had calculated and the money arrived in our bank account today - all done within one week!

However, for some strange reason, the refund of the 2013 Social Charges came from a tax office in Grenoble (Dept 38) and the interest on that has not yet been forthcoming. After further emails to Annecy, they have decided that the 2013 interest will also be paid by our local Trésorerie. We have advised them of this and await their reply - that might take a little while as the 2013 Social Charges were paid in three separate amounts on widely differing dates.

We have learned the following from all this:

1) The interest is calculated from date of original payment to date of refund

2) The interest is simple interest, not compound interest (no surprise there!)

3) The interest is NOT taxable and does not have to be shown on your tax return

We hope that this may be helpful to others. Thanks to all who replied to our original post.