Has anyone ever been asked for a form 3916 attestation, (3916 being the tax return document for declaring foreign bank accounts)?
I am being pressured to produce an attestation for my NatWest account by an Assurance Vie insurer. I declared the account in my first tax return on 3916, and ticked the appropriate box in subsequent years to confirm the continued existence of the account.
For anti money laundering (AML) reasons the insurers claim they need to see an attestation from the Impôts in respect of this account. Without it, they are refusing to accept funds (from a UK pension plan) that have been routed through this NatWest account. Alternatives, such as having pensions amounts paid directly to France either have cost implications, and/or create loss of control over exchange rates etc. I have sent them a signed copy of the original form, and the subsequent Avis d’impôts confirming the reporting of a foreign bank account, to no avail. See extract from emails below.
I can’t find any basis for this request in regulations, nor can I find references online to such an attestation either existing, or previously being sought. I imagine many SF members filing their French returns will have filled in form 3916, some for many accounts (!), and wonder if they have seen either an Impôts stamped 3916 in their personal Impôts account or have ever been asked for such an attestation?
Extracts from emails:-
"Le document (3916) n’est malheureusement pas recevable car il n’est pas tamponné par l’administration fiscale. Si vous avez déclaré le compte en 2021, vous devez avoir dans votre espace impots.gouv le CERFA 3916 validé par l’administration.
Le formulaire de déclaration ne prouve malheureusement ni le traitement de celle-ci par l’administration fiscale, ni l’enregistrement par celle-ci de votre compte bancaire à l’étranger."
Very reluctantly, I have requested such an attestation from the Impôts, and await their reaction. For the life of me, I can’t see what AML value having an Impôts stamp on a 3916 form gives the insurer, other than satisfying an appetite for purely risk-averse box-ticking…I hope nobody else has had similar demands.!
I have always filled 3916 in, for 2 accounts, (one which still contains the 32 pence I opened it with 15 years ago) but have never been asked to prove it to anyone. However I have not applied for an assurance vie either, so that might be the only reason why.
You will have the completed 3916 in your space, do they mean by this phrase the 3916, being in your space is therefore validated? If so, maybe can you can download the 2023 one and send them it?
I’m curious though how they know about the Natwest account - aren’t you simply using a France account or Rev etc to receive the pension funds and paying the AV through that account?
I had looked with interest in my espace particulier to see if there was any sight of a 3916, and if so was it validated automatically. Nothing is visible, even for the year I first declared it (2021 as a paper return, being my first year of filing). The tax returns online don’t contain either the original form, or even a copy. All that references 3916 is the annual ticking of box 8UU (I think?) on subsequent returns to evidence I still have a solitary overseas bank account.
The insurers know about NatWest as they required sight of the certificate proving I’d taken a UK distribution (from Standard Life), sight of the NatWest bank statement showing the movements in and out of the distribution, sight of the FX company transferring the amount to France, and sight of the amount coming in and out of my Credit Agricole account. A remarkable amount of paperwork for a relatively simple transaction. Standard Life refuse to pay the distribution directly in €, meaning there is a charge on receipt by Crédit Agricole (ie as a SWIFT, not SEPA transfer), and of course if they did pay directly, I’d lose all control over choice of optimal exchange rates etc.
I just hope the Impôts agree to stamp my copy of the 3916, and I can put an end to this completely ridiculous, OTT paper chase, which I think is out of all proportion to the virtually nil AML risks involved.
I’ve only ever been asked for tax reference numbers in regards assurance vie (along with proof of id etc). Mine is paid out into a UK account (and received all its funds from a UK account).
Reading their email they say it’s the print out of the 3916 from inside your impots account (which is there) - it’s obviously the complete form but it’s not stamped.
Now paper returns…may affect this. But under your actual return (not the avis) in the impots site there are other attachments/files - overseas income, 3916) - it’s not immediately obvious from memory but it’s there after some muttering when you file online.
Whther the paper return makes it there I don’t know
Me exactly the same, about £50 in an account which I was told years ago to forget about, think it is closed now automatically. Assurance vie not much use for me, the kids will get the house automatically and I won’t be needing a payout.
I have always wondered about this. When the first return is forced by France to be on paper I have always wondered by what process does that later become electronic so far as the 3916 is concerned.
I have always suspected there might be a lack of consistent process here.
For a few reasons I have kept my return on paper each year. I don’t receive a 3916 with what they send me to conplete which I conplete very dutifully and post back to them although I gave them one on my first return. I have always made a point of writing in a comment box each year since, that the 3916 given to them in year 20xx is unchanged, no accounts have been opened or closed, and the only transactions have been as declared in the return.
I will take a bet that what you receive will be the resilt of a manual process done by Impôts on an individualised basis.
Are you sure you want to deal with this party ongoing, that is making life difficult?
I emailed our made up 3916 paper forms to the Inspector we were dealing with, in our first year, and did message online the next year to say we did, and could we attach / send them electronically to the impot - they replied ‘non’, no facility to post them. Shoved copies in the impot letters box one day, never heard anything.
I suppose one could enter the original accounts in the online form now I’ve figured how to go above 99, but so far haven’t had the will. I do add the originals when an account is closed though - various switching offers, the banks etc occassionally closing the unused one’s etc.
It might get to the stage where it’s easier just having them all in their system. The most annoying thing is though that they change the order they are in each year! So try reconciling to one’s own spreadsheet database - arghh.
Thank you @larkswood12@chrisell for the suggestion to look for the ‘underlying documents’ tab. I looked and I looked at the year I filed the 3916 (2021) and there is absolutely nothing. And nothing visible the following year. Then for some (bureaucratic?) reason, an electronic certificate containing the data from my 3916 appears in 2023 and 2024. In response to the pressure from the insurers I’d (reasonably I think!) looked only in the year I filed the 3916, and following year for luck, thinking that was the logical place to look. I’m very grateful, as I’d never seen or heard of the existence of the ‘underlying documents’ data before.
@KarenLot Until finding the 3916 filed a few years later, I was assuming that having originally filed it in paper form, it wouldn’t be converted into a digital certificate (would they really go to all that effort),but remarkably they have done just that. I don’t know why they haven’t included it under the first two years I was in France, perhaps that’s the result of a manual intervention?
It’s very tempting to walk away. I have extracted from them a promise that seeking 3916 attestations etc is a one off. Future requests will be limited to the strictly necessary. In fairness, the Assurance Vie asset managers who I deal with, a fintech called Nalo, are very helpful and very responsive. But because they’re a fintech, they use a third party ‘bricks and mortar’ insurer to act as independent custodian of all client funds (which greatly reassures clients like me slightly sceptical about dealing with online only financial institutions). It’s the insurers, Generali, who are making mountains out of molehills, not the asset managers.
A Oh, you mentioned the Generali word. I was with them for my health insurance many years ago, must be around 15 I reckon, and only this year have my present insurers caught up with their demand then.
I declined well within the required time and sent them a recorded message as well and settled down with my €400 odd less with my new ones. Imagine my surprise a month or so later when I had a final demand for €1400. I replied saying that I did not accept their quote and therefore did not owe them anything. They followed that with a letter from their finance director threatening me with baliffs if I didn’t pay within a week.
I ignored it, knowing I was in the right, and never heard from them again. I hope you have better luck.
Looking at the digital version of my 3916, I noticed that it had a different year for the opening of the NatWest account (1977) to the one I had declared in a paper version (1996). For various reasons the 1977 date is, on reflection, probably more accurate.
The significance is that the 1977 date can only have come to the Impôts from HMRC, via the Automatic Exchange of Information process that over a hundred countries have entered into, to automatically swap tax related data. A salutary reminder of how even trivial information is routinely exchanged internationally.
Very interesting George1 and a salutary reminder of how much is going on in backoffice that we.might have no idea about.
I’m just thinking about what jobs their computer must have run on which sets of data for that date to be corrected on your record. Unless they’ve identified you as worthy of special attention, ie manually requested specific retrieval / matching / audit of your data, if this is the level of mass processing of everyone that’s going on then it’s actually quite scary and looks like it could have massive computer power behind it.
It also cheers me up that somewhere even in a later year they’ve kept my original 3916 in digital form by the sound of it.
