The income-tax notice (avis d'imposition) is the cornerstone of a French rental application and of many credit or benefit requests: it sets the household's reference taxable income (revenu fiscal de référence). It is also the most tampered document in rental files, because an inflated income opens doors the real one keeps shut. Yet it is easier to verify than almost any other document: the tax administration offers an online check, and the notice carries a signed 2D-Doc code.
The notice shows the taxpayer's tax number (13 digits), the notice reference (13 digits), the reference taxable income, the number of household shares (parts), the tax due, the address and the family situation. It carries two years: the year of the income declared and the following year, when it is issued. Right after filing, the declarative status notice (ASDIR) stands in for it, with the same identifiers.
Forgeries follow four patterns: an inflated reference income on a genuine notice; an old notice with the year changed; someone else's notice with the name and address replaced; a document built from scratch on a template. The first two are the most common, and the two checks below, taken together, catch all four: the first establishes that the notice exists and is the latest issued, the second that its figures were not touched.
The French tax administration runs a notice verification service (SVAIR), open without an account from impots.gouv.fr under "Vérifier un avis d'impôt" and meant precisely for the third parties a notice is shown to: landlords, agencies, public bodies. Enter the two identifiers printed on the document — the tax number (13 digits) and the notice reference (13 digits) — and the service answers with one word: conforme if that pair matches the latest notice the administration holds for that taxpayer, non conforme otherwise. It displays no amounts: tax confidentiality forbids it.
Read that verdict for what it is. "Non conforme" means the pair is unknown — a fabricated document, an altered or mistyped identifier — or that a more recent notice has since been issued: the applicant is showing you an old notice, perhaps superseded by a corrective return. "Conforme" proves that a genuine notice carries these identifiers and that it is the latest one; it does not prove that the printed figures are the original ones, since the service does not compare them. An inflated income on a genuine, current notice passes this check: the 2D-Doc code is what catches it.
Notices carry a 2D-Doc code: a DataMatrix electronically signed by the tax administration that repeats the document's key data (reference income, number of shares, notice reference, tax number, year). A 2D-Doc reader decodes it and verifies the signature; TrustyFile does so for every uploaded PDF, offline, with the certificates the authority publishes.
If the decoded data differs from what is printed, the visible text was edited and the code tells the truth. If the signature is invalid, the code was recomposed — something a forger cannot do correctly without the administration's private key. An unreadable code (blurry scan, photo) is not proof of anything, though: it leaves you with the SVAIR check — which attests that the notice exists, not its figures — and the cross-checks below. The guide on 2D-Doc explains the mechanism.
A notice consistent with itself may not be consistent with the file:
A notice downloaded from the taxpayer's personal space on impots.gouv.fr is a born-digital PDF, produced in one go by the administration's system. A notice altered in a PDF editor keeps traces: a revision added after creation, a slightly different font on the edited amount, the old figure still present under a white rectangle, editor or online-converter metadata. The guide on modified PDFs reviews these signals.
A scanned or photographed notice loses all of this: no usable PDF structure, and often no readable 2D-Doc. That is not a sign of fraud — many people only have a paper copy — but it is a document that cannot be verified on its own. Ask for the original PDF: it alone lets you read the 2D-Doc code and check the amounts.
A landlord may ask an applicant for their latest or previous-year tax notice: it is on the exhaustive list of documents set by the decree of 5 November 2015, which forbids demanding anything not listed. Presenting a forged notice is forgery and use of forged documents (article 441-1 of the French criminal code, up to three years' imprisonment and a €45,000 fine).
Faced with a doubtful notice: do not sign, keep the document and the exchanges, and remember that an unsuccessful applicant's documents must not be kept longer than necessary. TrustyFile archives nothing: the file is analysed, then deleted.
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