Foreign Perspectives

One of the problems with the paperless age is that you don’t have a little piece of paper to prove that you did whatever you said you did.

Despite having left France at the start of 2009 to live in Northern Ireland again, we still have problems with both tax and social services administrations. Today it was time to tackle offices in two different countries once more.

First off was the French taxation people who basically seem to have the view that nobody leaves France and that even if they do, the rest of the world is basically just an extension of France. I came across this several years ago when someone posted a question about it on one of the French forums. Basically her problem was that she had left France almost a year before, her post redirection service was running out and several French departments wouldn’t accept that she’d left so were therefore continuing to send her assorted bills (and benefit payments). As it turned out, the only proof that she had really left which would be accepted was a Certificate de Residence from her mairie. Unfortunately, there aren’t any mairies outside France the the closest equivalent (ie her local council) had no such document that they could give her. In the end, she had to just let the redirection service run out and leave the various departments to work it out for themselves.

I’m merely at the first off-ramp from that particular road at the moment so today it was the turn of the French taxation people to have another form sent back to them pointing out that I haven’t lived there for well over a year now. Somehow I don’t think they’ll take any notice of that as they didn’t last year but I guess it’ll be out of my hands soon as my own redirection service is running out.

On the other side of the fence, getting fully into the UK system is proving to be equally difficult. This time last year the health service were refusing to believe that we intended to live here and were merely health tourists. Quite how one proves one’s intent to live somewhere (which is what they wanted us to do) is still beyond me but we wore them down in the end. Child benefit was particularly difficult and instead of the “couple of weeks” quoted initially it turned out to be closer to four months. The particular problem with that is that you need the Child Benefit number for other forms and the lack of it complicates life no end. The other little problem is that we just couldn’t work out a way to tell the French child benefit equivalent that we’d left and they should stop paying us and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were still paying us.

At the moment, we’re working on the Child Tax Credit people who said last October that they couldn’t process our claim without a Child Benefit number, then they said almost two months ago when we finally could give them the Child Benefit number that it would take a “couple of weeks or so” to pay. Now they say they’ve no record at all of the claim!

Still, it’s nice to see European harmonisation of the taxation and social security systems. It would have been better to harmonise upwards in quality but I guess you can’t have everything.