Amazing for October, but its been so warm and sunny I’ve been out cycling every day. Partly for the exercise and the chance to enjoy the autumnal countryside, and partly because it is a diversion from opening the bills and demands for information that arrive in equal measure from the accountant and from URSSAF, who like to send a daily request for payment of social contributions.

Our microenterprise was short lived because we turned it into a SARL (a limited company) but we have so far received demands for payment amounting to approximately 200% of the total income for the micro-business. I wonder why we wound it up? Not that a SARL is any cheaper – pretty much the same but you have to pay an accountant as well.

Among his more daring exploits to save the French economy President Sarkozy has decided:

1) to let companies off the Taxe Professional for a year, as long as they are big companies – small companies pay this odious tax based on income not assets owned, and don’t get the exemption.  Goodness me, let’s make sure we’re not helping small businesses, after all they are only the future growth of the country

2) to pay for 30,000 houses to be built, where plans were already in place before someone noticed that no-one was actually buying new houses any more. Now I don’t like seeing building trades suffering any more than anyone else, but a housing market which is struggling because of limited demand is unlikely to benefit from 30,000 more properties being made available.

Indeed the crisis will remain until supply once again equals demand, and building lots more properties just postpones the inevitable for a few months.

But meanwhile its rude to criticise without making a couple of suggestions. So in case Mr Sarkozy has a spare moment this evening and comes across this blog looking for hot tips, here are a couple:

1) Help small businesses! Start with lower social contributions on the first, say, 30000 euros of income. How many countries charge the same rate on the first 10k as the second 10k? It’s madness, and makes it almost impossible to earn a living. Hence the majority of small French businesses operate a lot of their business ‘on the black’.

Why not charge a sensible level of charges and perhaps all these illegal earnings will actually be declared!? Let us grow without all these burdens and we will do OK, and ultimately pay more in taxes and employ more people than if we are all forced into liquidation. Good for us and good for France.

2) Help unemployed. Make it easy and painless to hire and fire people. We often need people to help us out but no one will do it unless it’s for cash because of the expenses involved. We wanted to employ a cleaner last summer on the ‘official’ cheque d’emploi system – but it took so long for the bank to sort out the account and give us the ‘official’ cheque book that the holiday season was over before we received it.

3) If someone (like us) starts a ‘micro enterprise’ then quickly realises that they will be earning more than the micro enterprise limits allow, so turns it into  ‘proper business’ that is surely a good thing, you would think? We will now lose 10 years of tax concessions (we supposedly live in an enterprise zone, where new businesses are helped) because we had three months where we weren’t sure if or how quickly the business would grow – so we started small to avoid the hefty costs involved in creating a limited company, and apparently therefore lose all entitlements.

Errr, does that sound a fair and reasonable reward for caution when starting a new business?

Hence I go out on my bike, which is fun, untaxed and takes my mind of these troublesome issues.