Since we came to France four years ago we’ve been adjusting to normal way of life, which includes declaring and paying taxes every year. I say “normal way” because in Serbia most of the taxes people end up paying are the taxes on the salary, and that is paid immediately before you receive your pay-check. Other taxes are mostly evaded, this way or another, and state fonds are therefore generally empty, which leads to poor social security and no money for the army, schools or pensions (all the money comes more or less from the same place).

It took a bit to adjust to the fact that taxes need to be declared, even if you pay for it monthly (so you can’t forget to pay and be penalized for it). Each year there is a different date limit (this year the end of may) by which you have to declare it. The process is unfortunately such that first you get a form by post from your local tax authorities and then you fill it in and send. The first year we never got the form, ended up not declaring taxes and paid penalty of 10%

Since then I take care and declare on time. French government has been quite loud in announcing the possibility to declare taxes online and has been offering a small money incentive of 20 Euros. Since I practically live online, year after year I’ve been trying to declare online but there’s always been some kind of problem. The latest stupidity from last year was that once you start the process online you actually have to wait for about 2 weeks to get your “certificate” by snail mail and then can proceed with the declaration?!?

This year the government finally got it right – based on several very long numbers that can only be found on my tax declaration form (that I still receive by snail mail) they generated a personal certificate for me on the fly. I can then proceed to “sign” the electronic declaration and do the whole process in a matter of minutes. The certificate was automatically imported into Firefox (all popular browsers are supported and there are detailed instructions for non-techies online) certificate store and I was able to successfully export it and import it into Internet Explorer 6. Great stuff!