Despite the fanfare around the French government launching an online one-stop-shop for entrepreneurs on January 1st to simplify the company formation procedure, the website was hacked causing delays for entrepreneurs.
As company formation experts here at Euro Start Entreprises, we were interested to see how this new site would work – especially as it was meant to streamline the procedure from having to go through six different departments to just one. However, even before the site was hacked, we found that we were still being directed through three different websites before landing on the one where we could add or change company details.
The CEO of Euro Start, Jean-Baptiste Puyraud, said: “I can see the logic in wanting to streamline the service. I admit it could be complicated before, but it did actually work. So if you’re going to try to make things simpler, then you have to make sure you can hit the ground running when you launch a new service, otherwise it just creates even more complications.”
The new set-up had been voted for in 2019 as part of the Pacte law to cut down on French bureaucracy. Any move to cut red-tape would seem like a good idea but even with almost four years of preparation, the interface hadn’t seemed quite ready for launch. Many law firms, accounting companies and notaries expressed their concerns that a half-baked launch would leave the system in an even worse state than before but their worries were ignored.
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Unfortunately, an even more serious problem arose when two days into the launch, the site suffered a major security attack when it was hacked by a virus that created 100,000 change requests per second - a huge increase that overwhelmed the system that only normally deals with 70,00 per week. The massive bombardment of virus requests caused the system to block and the site to eventually crash.
The government’s INPI department, which runs the site, has managed to get the site back up but now it comes with another problem. On the previous system you could go into the website and make as many updates as you needed to the registered company for one fee only. However, now you can only make one change at a time – meaning you have to log out and go back into the system with each change you want to make which wastes more time – and you also have to pay for each of those separate changes, even if it’s for the same company.
Macron’s wish to make France a quick-flowing entrepreneur’s paradise gave business people the hope that the country was marching to the rest of the world’s pace, however, it seems like the French system’s old gears are grinding to a different timescale. But there is an upside. Sometimes disasters pave the way for real changes to be made. We have already written to our local government ministers to ask for a meaningful change to the system and would urge all entrepreneurs out there to do the same. Hopefully this crisis can then highlight the problems within the system which need to be smoothed out to make sure the French company formation procedure works in a new and improved manner, both for French entrepreneurs and international business people who want to expand to France.
