Taxman Stories

When The Shit Hits The Fan

What happens when the French tax authorities fuck you in the ass

I woke up early here this morning fully refreshed and was looking forward to a glorious September day.

Then I saw a message on my phone from my bank.

L’AVIS A TIERS DETENTEUR

Don’t bother translating it — I’ll tell you! It means ‘Third Party Bailiff Order’. Or more to the point

We’ve just fucked you in the ass!

La Direction Générale des Finances Publiques — or the DGFiP — is a pseudo-military unit with more power than the KGB, CIA, Spectre and Moonraker combined.

These guys can enter your house, kill your family, slaughter your pets, and drink your booze. And when they’ve finished, block your bank account so you can’t even drink yourself to death.

This is what happened to me. My bank account was frozen, and unless I paid up immediately, there would be no food, no gas, no electricity, no takeaways, and no booze until Christmas.

I picked up the phone immediately.

‘Oui, Spectre here,’ came a deathly voice.

After an hour of speaking in my best French — which is passable these days— I got absolutely nowhere.

‘And how much was it again?’ I asked the voice.

He told me.

There is no real translation in French for When The Shit Hits The Fan.

Word Reference lists various options. But none of them quite convey the situation as accurately, or as poetically, as the English language version.

‘Is everything OK,’ my wife asked, noticing my unease.

‘Yeah,’ I quivered. ‘Mix-up at the tax office. By the way, do we have any food….?’

‘Funny you should say that, but we’re out of everything.’

I told her what had happened. Told her that because of our trip back to the UK in August, I’d inadvertently forgotten to pay our tax bill. Furthermore, I’d used some of the funds — well, in fact, all of them — to take some old mates out on a week-long bender in London. And because I hadn’t paid the bill, we had a fine on top of what we already owed.

It didn’t go down well, and for two days I ate dry Weetabix and spaghetti. On the third day, she relented and told me she had some cash stashed away in case dumb husbands prove that they are as dumb as they look.

Great! We had money, but as it was in hard cash, it meant I had to go down to the Centre Des Finance Publiques in person. If you’ve never been to a tax office in France, they are as inviting as a burial ground.

I approached the desk and explained to the receptionist why I was here. Her face turned the colour of cement. Not paying your tax in France is considered worse than incest, murder, and torture combined.

I tried to explain that I forgot to pay as I was in the UK visiting my dying mother. But she was unmoved.

‘We hear that every day,’ she said. ‘The guy before you claimed his mother had been killed in a terrible car accident. I knew he was lying as last year he told me she’d jumped out of a 40-storey high-rise.’

I decided to get on with it and gave her my wad of cash still hoping we could strike a deal. ‘How about fifty-fifty?’ I wanted to say, but bottled it when I saw the armed guards coming towards me.

Finally, after an age of punching my details into an ancient computer, she gave me a receipt and waved me away like I was a rapist.

‘And the block on my bank?’ I asked. ‘Is it lifted?’

She looked at me with pity. ‘Yes. You’re free to buy whatever you want— Fish ‘n’ Chips?’

For a minute I thought she was joking and was going to give me a smile. But how stupid of me. So I walked out of the building and drove straight to the supermarket to stock up on a year’s worth of food and booze…just in case.

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