Got a letter from URSSAF and had to google what URSSAF was while reading it

I said yes to one of our engineers spending the summer near her parents in France and assumed that was the end of it.

She’d been with us a couple of years and when April came around she asked if she could spend the summer near her parents outside Paris, it was fully remote either way so it didn’t feel like it mattered where, so I wrote back yes the same afternoon and moved on.

A few weeks later we got a letter from URSSAF (the French authority that collects social security contributions), saying that an employee of ours had been performing work on French soil since April, which under EU law meant the mandatory provisions of the French labour code applied to her employment from the day she crossed the border.

So we owed French social contributions going back that whole period and needed to formally register with URSSAF before we could do anything else.

We hadn’t changed a line of her contract and hadn’t thought about it once since I said yes, and it turned out that didn’t matter because the trigger is physical presence, and neither the employment contract nor where the company is registered changes that.

So France had cross-referenced her public profiles, a client email that listed a Paris address, and enough other administrative data that they had a clear picture of how long she’d been there and exactly when it started.

The registration took a few weeks, the back contributions came out to a few months of both the employer share and the employee share, which we hadn’t planned for, and her accountant had to file her income for that period separately to the French fisc on top of her home-country return because both jurisdictions now had a claim on the same months.

We fixed it by moving the arrangement through an EOR with a proper French entity, and both Deel and Workmotion cover this market and handle the employment in the country where someone is physically sitting instead of assuming the home contract stretches to wherever someone opens their laptop, which was the assumption we’d made and the one that cost us.

The approval was a single reply, and France had already started counting from the day she crossed the border.