The Center of Registration and Revision of Administrative Forms, currently abbreviated by the French acronym Cerfa, was a public French organism created by members of a administration in July 18, 1966,^[1] with the purpose of setting up and modifying all documents useful for communication with the administrations and public authorities.

Histoire et missions

Initially, the Cerfa was a division of the Insee (France's principal government institution in charge of statistics and census data), it was then reattached to the general secretary of the government by a decree on November 16th 1976,^[2] before being founded in a commission for administrative simplifications set by a decree on December 2nd 1998.^[3] Its missions now fall within the Interministerial Directorate for Public Transformation.

The decree No. 98-1083 of 2 December 1998 on administrative simplifications, since its modification in 2001, defines forms in the following way: “all documents, regardless of their presentation and medium, including electronic, enabling a user to carry out an administrative procedure".

The dispositions of articles L. 112-8 and following of the Code of Relations between the Public and the Administration give the right to the use of electronic forms in the administration and in particular to the use of pre-printed documents from PDF files downloadable via the service-public.fr^[4].

Documents cerfa

By extension, a cerfa or a CERFA is one of the forms developed by this administration. Depending on the area of practice, Cerfa may designate the following documents:

Health

• Le carnet de santé, cerfa No. 61/2087.
• La feuille de soins, cerfa No. 12541.

Urbanism

• The application form for a prior declaration of works, cerfa No. 13404.
• The demolition permit application form cerfa No. 13405.
• The application form for a regulatory declaration of the opening of a construction site (or DROC) , cerfa No. 13407.
• The building permit application form, cerfa No. 13409.

Labour Law

• The prior declaration form for the coordination of building and civil engineering operations, cerfa No. 13630^[5].

Acronym and number

In order for users to be able to easily recognise the applications and forms registered with CERFA, a specific acronym is used in addition to the serial number assigned. The acronym is composed of the inscription "cerfa" in a coloured oval.

Color

The oval and the associated number are the colour of the printing ink of the document, the letters "cerfa" inside the oval remaining the colour of the paper used.

Size and layout of the acronym-number set

The oval has a large diameter of 14 mm and a small diameter of 7 mm. The number is centred under the initial, 1.5 mm from it. The characters used for the number are 1.5 mm high half-bold lines.

Location

The combination of the acronym and number appears in the header of each form and application.