“There is nowhere written their name in Bercy”: on the taxation of the richest, Montchalin once again defends the “holding tax”

The controversy provoked by Éric Lombard continues. The former Minister of the Economy affirmed on Sunday that Bercy had the list of wealthy French taxpayers paying no income tax while his successor, Roland Lescure assured that this document did not exist. This Friday, the Minister of Action and Public Accounts, Amélie de Montchalin, once again defended on France 2 the “holding tax”, a tax measure which should prevent the very rich from having a minimal tax compared to their income.

On Sunday, in an interview with Libération, Éric Lombard estimated that there were “thousands” of French people paying no income tax despite more than comfortable resources, thanks to their “reference tax income equal to zero”, and affirmed that the Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) had the list. Faced with denials from Amélie de Montchalin, Wednesday in front of the deputies, then from Roland Lescure Thursday on France Inter, Éric Lombard maintained his comments.

“I can confirm to you that there is nowhere written in Bercy the names of people who have very low reference tax income. On the other hand, we know that it exists,” once again affirmed Amélie de Montchalin.

“The government proposed article 3 of the finance bill, which is called a holding tax, precisely so that we respond to this situation which is legal, which is a situation of over-optimization”, underlined the Minister of Public Accounts since December 2024. “My fight is not that, obviously, we leave the situation unchanged”, she insisted.

The thorny question of tax justice

Since the start of the budgetary debate, the government has hoped to remedy the low tax rates of the richest by introducing a “holding tax”, which will only be put in place by voting a budget for 2026. An exercise that Sébastien Lecornu, for lack of agreement in Parliament, has once again postponed. The Prime Minister wants, he says, to take “more time” to “not rush” and find a compromise. A speech is planned for this Friday.

This tax is criticized on both the right and the left, the former calling it a deadly overtaxation, the latter calling it a very minimal contribution. The holding tax “fell out of control in the budgetary debate,” Lombard criticized on franceinfo.

While inequalities are ever greater in our country and in the world, the debate once again raises the thorny question of tax justice. In 2024, less than half of tax households paid a net tax (18.2 out of 40.7 million tax households in total). Largely, due to insufficient income to be taxed.

If the 10% of households with very high incomes pay 76% of the IR paid by all taxpayers, a reference study by the Institute of Public Policies (IPP), published in 2023 on the basis of unpublished data from the tax administration, had demonstrated “a strong regressivity of the overall tax rate” once the threshold of the 0.1% of the richest French people had been crossed.

This fact is explained in particular by the structure of the assets of the highest income earners who are often paid once a year with the undistributed profits of their companies, and not every month in salary. However, corporate tax has a fixed rate of 25% (15% below 42,500 euros), while the salary tax rate can rise, in stages, up to 45%.