(French expat here, so impressions are from a few years ago and reading the press) The tax people are generally competent, and there was a huge effort to strea

(French expat here, so impressions are from a few years ago and reading the press) The tax people are generally competent, and there was a huge effort to streamline the process a few years ago. The rest of the French bureaucracy often lives somewhere in the middle ages ("of course you need to waste several hours by physically coming to our offices"). And the bastards are totally unable to communicate with each other. And that's the ones with funding. The parts which are criminally understaffed like Pôle Emploi (nominally tasked with finding work for the unemployed and distributing benefits), you really don't want to have to do anything with.