French tax notice: how to check it on impots.gouv.fr (and spot an edited PDF)

The French income tax notice (avis d’impôt sur le revenu) sums up a whole year of income in a single figure: the reference taxable income (revenu fiscal de référence). Landlords, letting agents, lenders and benefit agencies rely on it to decide, so it is the figure a borderline application is tempted to correct.

Editing it is within anyone’s reach: the notice is downloaded as a PDF from the taxpayer’s online account, an online editor is enough to replace an amount, and the altered document keeps the layout, logo and references of the original.

Checking a notice is not the same as suspecting the person who provided it. It is a routine control, applied the same way to every application, and it protects honest applicants too.

Everything starts with two identifiers printed at the top of the notice’s first page: the taxpayer’s tax number (numéro fiscal, 13 digits) and the notice reference (référence de l’avis, 13 characters).

They are the only details needed for the official check. They give no access to the person’s tax account: the service simply matches them against what the administration issued.

The tax notice verification service (SVAIR) is free and open to everyone. It is on impots.gouv.fr, under “Vérifier un avis d’impôt”, or directly at impots.gouv.fr/verifavis2-api/front.

Enter the tax number and the notice reference, then submit. If the screen shows “Conforme”, the reference matches the latest notice the administration has issued for that taxpayer. Otherwise the service says so: the reference does not exist, or a more recent notice has been issued since.

The service covers the income tax notice and the tax return status notice (ASDIR), the document issued after an online return, before the final notice.

Recent notices carry a square barcode on the first page, the 2D-Doc, designed by France Titres (ANTS) to secure supporting documents. It holds the document’s key data, electronically signed by the administration.

Scanned with a smartphone, from the verification service or a 2D-Doc reader app, it returns that data and shows whether the signature is valid. All that is left is to compare what it displays with what is printed on the notice: if the reference taxable income differs, the document was altered.

The 2D-Doc also works on a printed notice. It is useless, however, if it has been cropped, hidden or degraded until unreadable — which, on a notice supposedly straight from impots.gouv.fr, is already a signal.

This is the most misunderstood point. The online service checks the notice’s references, not the figures in the file in front of you: it does not display the reference taxable income or the tax amount.

A genuine notice whose reference taxable income alone was changed keeps its real references, and passes the online check with a perfectly accurate “Conforme”. Only a comparison with the 2D-Doc — when present and readable — and an examination of the file itself reveal the edit.

In other words, the official service answers “does this notice exist?”. You still need to answer “is this PDF the one the administration produced?”.

A notice downloaded from impots.gouv.fr is produced by the administration’s system, in one pass. Any later intervention leaves traces in the file, invisible on screen but readable by technical analysis.

Upload the PDF to Veritas-Doc: the analysis reports the tool that composed the document and the one that rewrote it, successive saves, white rectangles laid over amounts — with the original text recovered underneath when it is still there — and figures retyped in another font next to a mask. Every clue is named, weighted and located on the page.

A notice that claims the administration’s production chain but was reopened by an online PDF editor, or whose reference taxable income sits on a white patch, calls for an explanation before any decision.

First, check the references on the official service: an unknown or outdated notice stops there. Second, scan the 2D-Doc and compare its data with the printed amounts. Third, analyse the PDF file to detect a modification after issuance. Finally, cross-check the reference taxable income with the rest of the application: payslips, bank statements.

None of these steps is enough on its own; together, they leave very little room for an edited notice. Whatever the outcome, keep a record of what you checked.