French PAYE Tests Riddled With Errors

France is ready to go over to pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) taxation in January, despite a press report of thousands of mistakes in trial runs, public accounts minister, Gerald Darmanin, tweeted this weekend. The ministry in charge of the changeover on Sunday said there would be no going back, RFI reported. The system “is ready for January 2019”, Darmanin’s ministry announced on Sunday after a report in Le Parisien newspaper raised serious doubts about whether that would really be the case. There have been thousands of glitches in tests run by the government and employers over the last year, the paper reported, with as many as 352,000 in February. It quoted a leaked account of a “crisis meeting” at the economy ministry at which “the civil servants feared the worst” if PAYE is introduced on schedule at the beginning of next year. The change, which was first mooted under previous president Francois Hollande, has already been postponed once but was one of President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign commitments. But Le Parisien reported “massive and completely random mistakes”, some of which were also recurrent.