Why keep it simple when you can make it complicated…? If there is one area in which France excels, it is precisely this.
Nearly 4 million micro-entrepreneurs have adopted this status since 2009, to the point that it now represents more than a third of business creations in France. But now, 15 years later, regulatory changes are accumulating at an unprecedented pace: compulsory electronic invoicing, increase in social security contributions for BNCs, new VAT thresholds, tightening of ACRE, strengthening of tax controls… The microentrepreneur is suffocating in the land of over-regulation.
The original promise: simplicity as a philosophy
The self-employed regime, which became a micro-entrepreneur in 2014, was based on a clear premise: administrative complexity kills entrepreneurial vocations before they are even born. Its architecture bears witness to this: contributions calculated as a percentage of the turnover collected, with no minimum, no fixed charge, a VAT exemption allowing you to invoice without having to master the mechanics of value added tax, an accessible turnover threshold, since raised to 203,100 euros for commercial activities and 83,600 euros for the provision of services.
What is happening now is not reform but accumulation. Electronic invoicing becomes compulsory in September, contributions for liberal professions under the BNC regime increase from 24.6% to 25.6%, a modest increase in absolute value but which adds to other pressures. ACRE, this partial exemption from social security contributions intended for creators, has seen its advantage reduced from 50% to 25%, making the first years of activity significantly more expensive. Discussions around VAT exemption thresholds, initiated two years ago as part of European harmonization, leave a persistent uncertainty surrounding a tax liability threshold which could go down to 25,000 euros… And in the background, the tax administration is intensifying its controls, putting an end to what some called the de facto tolerance from which certain micro-entrepreneurs benefited in terms of accounting audits.
None of these measures is absurd taken in isolation. Their simultaneity constitutes a very worrying signal. It is no longer the creation of an activity in a few clicks but the management of a regulatory portfolio part-time, before even having invoiced a single client.
Simplifying is not deregulating
What the State is doing is not part of a coherent policy. No authority has announced that it wants to put an end to the micro-entrepreneur regime. And yet, measure after measure, this is precisely what happens: a methodical erosion of what made it interesting. Defending the simplicity of this status is not arguing for a tax blind spot. It is a reminder that a clear, predictable and stable regime constitutes in itself a public policy: one which allows hundreds of thousands of people to work legally, to pay contributions and to contribute to the economy without mobilizing the resources of a legal service. Each regulatory layer added without compensation for readability is an implicit invitation to informality.
The micro-entrepreneur status has proven over the past fifteen years that it meets a real, deep and lasting need. Millions of French people have been able to try an activity, supplement an income, build a professional transition or simply practice their profession without being locked into a disproportionate legal structure. Undoing this tool by accumulating disparate constraints would amount to solving a secondary problem by creating a primary problem: that of entrepreneurial discouragement in a country which still has a lot to gain from making individual initiative more fluid. The question that should guide each reform affecting this status is not only that of its tax fairness or its social sustainability, but that of its readability for those who get up one morning with the idea of working for themselves. If the answer to this question takes too long to formulate, something essential will have been lost.
