Currently, the French VAT representative market is very maxed. Many non-professional tax representatives who enter the industry without relevant knowledge of accounting and tax law, which cause a lot of problems, even there are also tax representatives absconding with money. It is very important for cross-border sellers to choose a good tax representative to ensure compliance and long-term growth of their stores in France.
If cross-border sellers are not satisfied with their current French VAT tax representative, the law allows them to change their French tax representative. However, when choosing a new tax representative, cross-border sellers should inspect not only their price, but also their qualifications and capabilities. This article will explain how to change French tax representative.
Changing a tax representative is different from registering a new VAT number. As there is already a declaring history, the newly appointed tax representatives will need to obtain all of the sellers’ previous declaring record to ensure that there is no bad record of their customers in the French tax system, such as failure to declare on time or failure to pay taxes. For sellers who have no declarations for a long time or for sellers with obvious anomalies, the formal tax representatives may deny their customers ‘request to change tax representative, if sellers do not have any reasonable supporting documentation.
When the cross-border sellers change their tax representatives, the main documents that new tax representative companies will need include:
- The business license and legal identity document of the cross-border e-commerce.
- Contracts with new tax representative.
- Store information.
- Authorization documents for the new tax representative.
- French VAT number documents and at least three months of previous declarations for the VAT number together with the payment receipts. If there is no declaration, the cross-border sellers will be required to provide supporting documents such as sales report.
- Statement of termination of authority of the former tax representative.
The new tax representative will first need to review all of the documents and, if correct, will submit a mandate to their tax authority to accept the change of tax declaration services. The new tax representative will also coordinate and communicate with the former tax authorities. Generally speaking, the time limit will be more difficult to estimate, because the time limit for changing to a new tax representative involves the cooperation between the tax authorities of the old and the new tax representative. If the processing goes smoothly, the new tax representative can obtain VAT registering rights in about 2 weeks at the earliest, that means the successful completion of the cross-border e-commerce change tax representative application.
