Down with privileges? Like every year, the French are not housed in the same boat with regard to the deadline for filing their tax return. Some have only six weeks to complete their task while others will have one or even two weeks off. And they are always the same!
Thus, this year, the inhabitants of departments 1 (Ain) to 19 (Corrèze) or from abroad have until May 25 at midnight, those of departments 20 (Haute-Corse and Corse-du-Sud) to 54 ( Meurthe-et-Moselle) until June 1 and finally all the others, from department 55 (Meuse) to the Overseas Territories before June 8.
But where does this feature come from? To understand this, you have to go back to the early 2000s. The possibility of declaring your income online was opened in 2001 with a single deadline for the whole of France. Only 17,000 Internet users try it and everything goes without a hitch.
The bug of the year 2002
But from the following year, the craze was quite different: 50,000 people made a teledeclaration in ten days so that three days from the end, faced with the influx of Internet users, the platform saturated, forcing the tax authorities to announce peak hours to avoid. An additional period of 48 hours will even be granted at the last moment and a total of 117,000 taxpayers will file a declaration via the Internet.
In order to avoid saturation of the platform and the bottleneck of the last few days, a rotation is set up with an additional period granted to online declarants according to the school holiday calendar (the famous zones A, B and C). Until 2010 when the new division according to department numbers will be implemented.
“This new division will make it possible to better distribute and better manage flows. And it’s easier for taxpayers, ”says UMP Senator Philippe Marini, the instigator of this measure, in Le Parisien.
Since then, nothing or almost nothing has changed – only the upper limit of the second zone has moved in 2020 from department 50, Manche, to 54, Meurthe-et-Moselle. To justify the end of rotation between areas, the DGFiP highlights the habits and benchmarks now rooted in the minds of taxpayers.
In any case, it is better not to wait until the last moment. Advice that is difficult to follow for procrastinators for whom having six, seven or eight weeks of time to complete your declaration does not change anything.