Last thursday, Narelle and I went to URSSAF to register her as a "travailleur independant", which is closest to what a Freelance worker is (I guess). See, Narelle is trying to establish herself as an English teacher. The hardest part was really to find the entrance point: where do you start looking for information, when you don't know what you're looking for?
So, I went and asked my IUT workmate Olivier, who recently hit his 30's crisis and resigned from his position to get thinking about the meaning of life, the margin his employer was doing on his back and how to get it for himself, all that being achieved by freelancing. He directed us to the very helpful Web site of APCE, and confimed what Narelle's friend Jennifer, who's also a teacher, had told us: just go to URSSAF.
Right oh, so we went, cowing in fear with the still fresh memories of the administrative hell we went through to get married and to sort out immigration, to URSSAF. We got a ticket at the front desk, sat down to wait for our number to be called, got up 37s later as we were called, and were introduced to an enthousiastic, smiling young man. Narelle liked him even though he had a tatoo, and that's saying something.
Turns out that it was all really simple: after giving names and current INSEE number, Narelle's registration was automatically sent through the computer to the health insurrance, social security, INSEE (that's the French bureau of statistics by the way), pension, and gods know what else. Seconds later, she had a SIRET number that gives her magic invoicing powers. The whole thing just lasted thirty minutes, with no papers whatsoever required. That goes to show that they do make it easy for you to pay tax.