The 34 million property owners concerned initially had until Friday June 30 to make their declaration online. But a week before the final deadline, just over 50% of declarants had taken the step. Given the influx of declarations at the end of the period, Bercy finally announced this Friday that it would be possible to do so without penalties until July 31, 2023 inclusive.
For the record, the last tranche of housing tax was abolished in 2023 on main residences and for main residences only. Thus, the owners of a second home must always pay this tax or the tax on vacant dwellings, if applicable. This declaration of real estate, which sees the light of day this year, should allow the administration to establish local taxes and to cross-reference the information with the rest of the household declarations in order to avoid fraud.
New, poorly known, difficult to read, but mandatory, this tax constraint leaves taxpayers perplexed. Especially since this declaration must be done online, unlike the declaration of income where the paper form is always an option, which can make the process even more complex. In a press release published last week, the Solidaires-Finances publiques union castigates “the choice made by the administration to proceed with a campaign, and a declaration only by digital means causes a misunderstanding at the level of taxpayers, and in parallel an increase increasingly significant incivilities”.
“Like any declarative obligation, this raises questions,” puts the director general of public finances, Jérôme Fournel, into perspective. According to him, requests from DGFIP agents on this subject have jumped by around 20%.
