Our Blog - French bureaucracy

French bureaucracy .... everybody always talks about it and normally not in a positive way. Most of us deal with it a few times a year specifically for immigration and taxes. I have no idea how difficult US immigration is (although I hear it isn't easy) since we never have had to deal with it, as US citizens. When we were looking at moving to France, we did lots of investigation and read lots of horror stories about dealing with the French government on immigration. Our experience, in general, have been fine. Our visa (through the Consulate in Houston) came fairly quickly, and they were also very responsive when we found we had an issue with it and helped us resolve that without having to fly back to the US.

We have gotten our Carte de Séjour (basically our resident card that says we have the right to temporarily live in France) and the first renewal without too much difficulty. We documented our process for our first Carte de Séjour in this blog entry. We also were able to do a reciprocal exchange of our drivers license fairly easily. We also documented this process in our Exchanging our licenses blog. We always "freak out" a little bit in advance of the appointment but then everything seems to go fairly smoothly.

Today, we had yet another positive experience. Our property tax for the apartment (called the taxe foncière) arrived a month or so ago and it had our old mailing address on it. This was most likely due to the fact that while we bought the apartment in September of last year, we didn't move in until December. When we did the closing with the Notaire, he had specifically noted that we would not be moving in until later. We didn't get the taxe foncière bill last year because it was included in the closing. The tax office is actually just across the street from where we live, so we walked over this morning. At the reception desk (the accueil), we explained what we needed and they directed us to Building D (which was easy to find with the signs in the courtyard). We waited in line at the accueil there and while in line, someone came and was asking each person what they needed (to direct people to other areas as needed). For us, she said the colleague at the desk could take care of it. Two minutes later, we hit the front of the line and, sure enough, 2 minutes later we were on our way. He (we assume) made the appropriate change in the computer after looking at our tax bill and our carte de séjour's.

We *do* end up with a problem every year with our income tax declaration and bill, and we are extremely happy that we had budgeted to hire an international tax specialist to help us with that. I can't imagine trying to deal with our income taxes and the tax treaty by ourselves. But this was one of the things that we had put into our budget and made sure that we worked long enough, and saved enough money, to be able to pay someone to help with our taxes every year. Most things we felt we could handle, but doing our own taxes was not one of them!