Foreign Perspectives

The transition year from the tax system of one country to another can cause a number of peculiarities in payment of tax and social security as you’d expect.

For a start, the UK tax year runs from April to March whereas the French one is from January to December and both systems operate on the basis that you’re taxed by tax year. That’s relatively easy to resolve in practice as each country seems to apportion the tax according to when you made the move. What’s much more complex is the social security and healthcare arrangements.

We told the Inland Revenue in March 2004 that we were moving to France in April of that year. In fact, we told them twice in March as we wanted to register as overseas landlords (we’re renting out our UK property). Then we told them twice more in April that we had moved and indeed started getting letters directly to our French address. Snag is, that they continued to send letters to our UK address, my parents address and even my work address!

As you can imagine, we were quite busy for the first few months so it was June before we thought we’d have another go and told them yet again that we were here, twice more in fact. Finally on the seventh attempt they decided that we owed them over £500 as we’d not told them that we’d moved!

How come?

Well, the seven times that we told them we moved break down as follows:

1. in March and April 2004 we told our own Inland Revenue tax office;

2. in March and April 2004 we told the Inland Revenue “landlord abroad” people;

3. in June we told the Inland Revenue Child Benefit people; and

4. in June and July we told the Inland Revenue Tax Credit people.

In fact, we originally thought that telling just our own tax office was enough in that they use the same reference number for us as all the other Inland Revenue offices. So it should, but the problem is that the other offices were just lumped into Inland Revenue piecemeal within the last few years and integration between them is virtually zero at the moment. Even so, you’d think that telling our own offce twice was enough but in fact they still send letters to me at our previous address, my former work address and here, seemingly at random and it’s been over two years now since we made the move.

After yet another “pay up or else” notice in 2005, we wrote them a letter running through the sheer number of times we’d told them (and legally, we only needed to tell them once!). That at least resulted, eventually, in an apology and confirmation that we don’t owe them anything.

And yet, within the last week Wendy received another “pay up or else” letter. Funnilly enough the very same envelope contained a letter saying that she didn’t owe anything. Both signed by the same person!

Still, at least they’ve worked out that she’s living here. Where they sent my copy of the same letter (they always come in pairs) is anyones’ guess.