Life after the E106

[david66]

Hi... for my own peace of mind could anyone advise on the following:

I moved out to France premanently with my wife and two children in April 2007, where I took a year and a half off and lived on savings and a military pension I recieve. We applied for the carte vitale and are covered by this upto July 2009 as part of the E106 coverage, along with child benefit payments from the CAF.

I now have the chance to begin work again and are looking to begin doing so in December this year. The work being short contracted work in both Europe and further afield in Africa and possibly Middle East.

I am a fiscal resident in France and filled out my first tax return for 2007, which on reciept of the "impot sur les revenus de 2007" I was informed there was no income tax to pay.

I guess my long winded question is this. Before I begin work in December 2008, which organisations must I inform? I would naturally assume the hotel des impots and the CAF for their advice but are there others as well regarding payments for future social charges? Naturally as a resident I wish to pay my taxes in order to continue the coverage of the carte vitale when this expires in June 2009.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

David

[Bevdeforges]

Technically, it's your employer who is responsible for making the payments to the French social insurance funds. But if you are going to be working as a contractor, you may want to establish yourself as a travailleur independent. Precisely what sort depends on what sort of work you are going to be doing, but the good news is that the cotisations have been simplified so that you only pay to a single agency to cover all your social insurances. (For travailleurs indépendent, it's called RSI, but it's basically URSSAF.)

Unless you're being paid extraordinarily well, you might want to consider declaring your December payment as a micro BIC or micro BNC for 2007. Then, you can set up your business in January, if you're tempted by this new auto-entrepreneur statute or want to take advantage of any of the other recent simplifications of the business statutes. (They all seem to take effect January 1st so no sense setting yourself up under conditions that are going to change.)

In any of the micro statutes, you pay your cotisations based on your gross intake (i.e. what you're being paid). There are limits to the income you can account for in this way, but you don't have to prepare accounting documents for your business, other than a listing of what you've been paid. In the regular statutes (EURL, for example), you have to track your income and expenses, but you pay taxes and cotisations based on your net income - which can be considerably less expensive if you have expenses against your income.

You may want to talk to someone at your local Chambre de Commerce or Chambre des métiers for some help in understanding the various business forms that are available to you. Or check the newsstands - the business magazines are putting out quite a bit of information right now (in French) about the changes to the business forms that could be useful to you.
Cheers,
Bev

[david66]

Many thanks for this advice......the travailleur independent option may well be the way ahead with this one.

David