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Administrative Adventures in France
“To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you’re always likely to run foul of some agency or another.” — Michel Houellebecq, Submission
One of the realities of life in France is that you never really know when something is going to come from some agency that requires your (more or less) immediate attention. Sometimes you expect it, like the tax forms that are released in May and expected to be filed in early summer, followed by the official government acknowledgement of the correctness of your sums in late September. Sometimes these documents and declarations arrive on time, sometimes not, because, after all, this is France.
Taxes
But sometimes you’ll get something for an unexpected reason. One such correspondence arrived towards the end of 2018. It came in an envelope from the Direction Générale des Finances Publiques, which never contains good news, and can be paralyzing enough to some of my French friends that they tell me they set aside such envelopes to read a week or two in the future, when they have “gotten up the strength” for it. I’m a “bad news first” sort of person so I will sometimes tear into the envelope on the way up the stairs from my mailbox.
