You run a French company from abroad. The registered office is in Paris, the accountant sends emails you half-read, and one morning a formal letter arrives from the greffe du tribunal de commerce — the registry office of the French commercial court. It says your company has not filed its comptes annuels, its annual accounts, and orders you to file them under a daily penalty payment. You have never seen this document before, your French is hesitant, and you wonder whether this is a scam, a formality, or the beginning of serious trouble. It is the beginning of serious trouble if you ignore it, and it is entirely fixable if you act in the right order. This guide explains, in plain English and with the exact French legal texts, how to check what your company missed, what the injunction from the court registry really means, who pays the penalty, where criminal law starts, and how a foreign owner cures a missed filing from abroad and stops it happening again.
Three French terms will follow you through this article, so let us define them once. The greffe du tribunal de commerce is the clerk’s office and company registry attached to each commercial court; it keeps the registre du commerce et des sociétés (RCS), the trade and companies register in which your company is identified by its SIREN number. The Kbis is the official extract of that registration — the identity card of your company that banks, landlords and clients ask for. The BODACC (Bulletin officiel des annonces civiles et commerciales) is the official gazette in which filings of accounts are announced to the public. None of these bodies sends warning emails with payment links; the real procedure is a court injunction, and this article tells you how to recognise it and what to do within days, not months.
I. How do you know your French company missed its annual accounts filing and what does the greffe injunction mean?
A. Your company missed two chained deadlines: approval of the accounts, then filing at the court registry
French company law imposes not one but two successive obligations every year, and foreign owners often discover the second only when the sanction arrives. First, the directors must draw up the accounts. Article L232-1 of the Commercial Code provides that at the close of each financial year the board, the management board or the managers draw up the inventory and the annual accounts and establish a written management report. Article L123-12 of the Commercial Code adds the accounting backbone: every trader must record movements affecting the assets of the business chronologically, check by inventory at least once every twelve months the existence and value of assets and liabilities, and draw up annual accounts at year-end comprising the balance sheet, the profit and loss account and notes forming a whole. If your French subsidiary has a local bookkeeper but nobody supervises the year-end work, the failure usually starts here, silently, months before anyone writes to you.
Second, the accounts must be approved by the shareholders, and in a société à responsabilité limitée (SARL, the French limited liability company run by a gérant, a manager) the rule is strict on timing. Article L223-26 of the Commercial Code states that the management report, the inventory and the annual accounts drawn up by the managers “sont soumis à l’approbation des associés réunis en assemblée, dans le délai de six mois à compter de la clôture de l’exercice sous réserve de prolongation de ce délai par décision de justice”. In plain English: the shareholders must meet within six months of the financial year-end to approve the accounts, unless a court extends the deadline. Most French companies close their year on 31 December, so the ordinary meeting must normally be held before 30 June. For a société par actions simplifiée (SAS, the flexible joint-stock company run by a président, a president, which most foreign founders choose) and for the société anonyme (SA), the parallel rule sits in article L225-100 of the Commercial Code: “L’assemblée générale ordinaire est réunie au moins une fois par an, dans les six mois de la clôture de l’exercice, sous réserve de prolongation de ce délai par décision de justice.” In an SAS, article L227-9 of the Commercial Code leaves the articles of association to organise how shareholders decide collectively, but it expressly reserves annual accounts and profits to collective decision of the shareholders. A sole shareholder can approve alone, but the approval must still exist in writing and be dated; an unwritten “we agreed by email” is not an approval.
Third, once approved, the accounts must be filed — déposés — at the court registry to be annexed to the trade and companies register. For an SARL, article L232-22 of the Commercial Code requires filing “dans le mois suivant l’approbation des comptes annuels par l’assemblée ordinaire des associés ou par l’associé unique ou dans les deux mois suivant cette approbation lorsque ce dépôt est effectué par voie électronique”. For companies limited by shares, article L232-23 of the Commercial Code sets the same rhythm of one month, or two months for electronic filing. The generalRegistry rule in article R123-111 of the Commercial Code confirms the one-month period from approval, extended to two months for electronic filing. In practice, since the 2023 reform, filing runs through the Guichet unique, the single online entry point operated by the INPI (the French intellectual property and companies office), which routes the documents to the competent greffe. Once filed, the registry clerk publishes a notice in the BODACC announcing that the company deposited its accounts for the closed year. If your company approved its accounts but nobody filed them, or filed them but never checked the BODACC notice, the chain is broken at the last link and the company is still in breach.
How do you check, from London, New York or Dubai, where your company stands? Ask your French accountant three dated questions and demand documents, not reassurance: was an annual general meeting or written sole-shareholder decision approving the accounts for the last closed year actually signed, and on which date; were the approved accounts, the proposed and voted allocation of the result, and where applicable the auditor’s report transmitted to the Guichet unique, with the filing receipt; and does a BODACC notice of deposit exist for that year. Cross-check on the public side: order a recent Kbis to confirm the company is still active and correctly registered, and search the BODACC announcements for the company name and SIREN number to see which years were actually published. A frequent foreign-founder pattern is the “approved but never filed” file, where the accountant prepared everything, the founder signed a meeting minute late, and nobody pressed the electronic filing button. Another is the “filed but rejected” file, where the Guichet unique asked for a missing document — typically the resolution allocating the result or the auditor’s report — and the request sat unread in an inbox. Both look identical from the outside, a missing year in the public record, and both trigger the same injunction procedure described below. Note also that the Kbis itself never shows whether accounts were filed; banks and serious counterparties check the accounts history separately, and a gap of one or two unpublished years is read by a French bank as a governance red flag, which is one reason loan and account reviews go wrong for companies with filing arrears.
B. The letter from the greffe is a court injunction backed by a daily penalty, and the director pays it personally
The letter that frightens foreign directors is usually an injonction de dépôt, an injunction to file, issued by the president of the commercial court. Its legal basis is article L123-5-1 of the Commercial Code, which provides that “le président du tribunal, statuant en référé, peut enjoindre sous astreinte au dirigeant de toute personne morale de procéder au dépôt des pièces et actes au registre du commerce et des sociétés auquel celle-ci est tenue par des dispositions législatives ou réglementaires”. In ordinary language: at the request of any interested person or of the public prosecutor, the president of the court, ruling in summary proceedings, can order the director of any legal entity, under a penalty payment, to carry out the filings with the trade and companies register required by law. The president can also appoint an agent to complete the formalities at the company’s expense. The astreinte is the key instrument to understand: it is not a fine paid to the State but a daily or lump-sum amount that starts running while you do not comply, designed to force your hand. The president first sets it, often at several dozen or hundred euros per day of delay, then later liquidates it, meaning the court fixes the final amount owed for the period of non-compliance, and that amount can reach thousands of euros for a file left sleeping for months.
Who can trigger this? The text says any interested person or the public prosecutor, and in practice the circuit is highly automated: the greffe detects that no accounts were deposited for a closed year, the file is reported, and the president issues the injunction. A minority shareholder, a creditor, or even a competitor checking your BODACC history can also petition. Do not treat the letter as an invitation to negotiate the principle; the court does not ask whether filing is useful for your group, it notes an objective breach of a publicity obligation. The only fast exit is to file. If you receive the order while living abroad, instruct a French lawyer immediately, because time limits in summary proceedings are short, the order is enforceable, and the penalty clock starts whether or not you understood the French text. Keep the envelope and every page: the date of service determines the starting point of the penalty, and a lawyer needs the exact reference of the order, the court, and the SIREN number to file observations or request a realistic compliance deadline.
The point foreign directors misunderstand most is who pays. The injunction is addressed to the dirigeant, the director — the gérant of an SARL, the président of an SAS — and the liquidated penalty falls on that person, not on the company. The Court of Cassation said so in the clearest terms on 7 May 2019 (Commercial Chamber, appeal no. 17-21.047, published in the Bulletin): “lorsque le président d’un tribunal de commerce, ayant enjoint sous astreinte au représentant légal d’une personne morale de déposer les comptes annuels, constate le défaut d’exécution et liquide l’astreinte, le représentant légal est condamné à titre personnel” (Court of Cassation, Commercial Chamber, 7 May 2019, no. 17-21.047). Translation: where the president of a commercial court, having ordered the legal representative of a legal entity under penalty payment to deposit the annual accounts, finds non-performance and liquidates the penalty, the legal representative is condemned in a personal capacity. You cannot hide behind the company, and you cannot assume the parent company abroad will be billed instead of you. If you are the appointed president of a French SAS while living in another country, your personal assets answer for the penalty, and a French enforcement title can follow you within Europe under the European enforcement instruments. Resigning today does not erase the penalty for yesterday’s non-compliance either; the liquidation covers the period during which you were the representative under the injunction, so a hasty resignation after receiving the letter is both useless and suspicious to a court.
Two companion mechanisms complete the picture. First, shareholders and interested parties who cannot obtain company documents can also petition the court president to order their disclosure under penalty payment, under article L123-12 of the Commercial Code‘s accounting duties read together with the disclosure rules, and article L238-1 of the Commercial Code opens the same summary remedy where documents subject to mandatory communication are withheld. In a foreign-owned company this is typically how a dispute surfaces: the local minority partner or the departing co-founder petitions for the accounts, the court orders production, and the filing arrears come to light at the same time. Second, failing to convene the shareholders’ meeting at all exposes the directors to a separate injunction to convene: article L223-26 provides that if the meeting has not been held within six months, the public prosecutor or any interested person can petition the court president to order the managers to convene it, if necessary under penalty payment, and article L225-100 gives the same remedy to the public prosecutor or any shareholder in companies limited by shares. A foreign owner who discovers that no meeting was ever convened for the last two years should therefore expect not one but potentially two court orders — convene, then file — each with its own penalty clock.
II. How does a foreign owner fix a missed filing and limit fines, criminal exposure and business damage?
A. Cure the breach now from abroad, in the right order, and know exactly where criminal law begins
The cure has an order, and the order matters because each step conditions the next. Step one is to establish proper accounts for the missing year rather than inventing numbers to fill the gap. If the bookkeeping for that year was never completed, instruct the French accountant to close it now: chronological recording of movements, inventory check, balance sheet, profit and loss account and notes, as article L123-12 requires. If the previous accountant is unresponsive — a classic situation when the founder changed firms without organising the handover — appoint a new expert-comptable (the French chartered accountant) immediately and have the former firm’s files recovered formally, because filing accounts you know to be false in order to stop the penalty clock replaces an administrative breach with criminal exposure for false accounts. Keep every engagement letter and email proving you ordered the catch-up; a director who can show the court dated instructions to the accountant is in a far stronger position when asking for indulgence on the penalty than one who simply says the accountant never told them.
Step two is to approve the accounts late but validly. Convene the shareholders’ meeting now, even if the six-month deadline expired a year ago, or sign a sole-shareholder approval decision with the allocation of the result. Here the criminal case law gives foreign directors a precise and reassuring boundary. Article L241-5 of the Commercial Code punishes managers of SARLs: “Est puni de 9 000 € d’amende le fait, pour les gérants, de ne pas soumettre à l’approbation de l’assemblée des associés ou de l’associé unique l’inventaire, les comptes annuels et le rapport de gestion établis pour chaque exercice.” The parallel provision for companies limited by shares is article L242-8 of the Commercial Code, punishing the chairman, directors or general managers who fail for each year to draw up the inventory and establish annual accounts and a management report, with a 9,000 euro fine. But on 25 June 2025 the Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation drew the line that every foreign director should know (appeal no. 24-81.671): “Est constitutif du délit prévu par ce texte le fait, pour les gérants de sociétés à responsabilité limitée, de ne pas soumettre à l’approbation de l’assemblée des associés ou de l’associé unique l’inventaire, les comptes annuels et le rapport de gestion établis pour chaque exercice.” And, crucially: “le seul retard dans la soumission des documents comptables à l’assemblée des associés ou de l’associé unique d’une société à responsabilité limitée n’est pas constitutif d’infraction pénale” (Court of Cassation, Criminal Chamber, 25 June 2025, no. 24-81.671). In English: the offence is the failure to submit the documents at all, but mere lateness in submitting them is not a criminal offence. The Court added the legislative reason: “Depuis l’entrée en vigueur de la loi du 22 mars 2012, qui a modifié l’article L. 241-5 du code de commerce, ne se trouve plus réprimé le fait de ne pas procéder à la réunion de l’assemblée des associés dans les six mois de la clôture de l’exercice” — since the 2012 reform, failing to hold the meeting within six months is no longer itself punished. The practical message is direct: approve late today rather than never, because a late approval cures the criminal risk under L241-5 while persistent omission keeps it alive. This does not neutralise the civil penalty clock, which keeps running until filing, but it removes the criminal file from the table for that head of liability.
Step three is to file everything through the Guichet unique and secure the proof. The filing package for an SARL or SAS typically includes the approved annual accounts, the management report where required, the proposed and voted allocation of the result, and the statutory auditor’s report if the company has a commissaire aux comptes (the French statutory auditor, mandatory above certain balance-sheet, turnover and headcount thresholds or when a shareholder minority requests one). File electronically to benefit from the two-month-from-approval window, keep the filing receipt with its timestamp, and verify within days that the BODACC notice of deposit appears for the company and the year concerned. If the filing is rejected for a missing attachment, complete it within days: registrars’ rejection emails are the most common cause of files that directors believed cured but were not. If an injunction order is already pending before the court president, have your lawyer inform the court of the filing the day it happens and request the liquidation of the penalty at the lowest level, producing the BODACC notice as evidence that compliance is complete. Courts routinely reduce the final amount where the director shows fast, complete compliance after the order; they show no mercy where the director files partially, late, or only after the liquidation hearing.
Step four is to understand the outer criminal boundary so you never cross it while repairing. Beyond the failure-to-submit offence, French criminal law punishes accounting disorder severely when a company later enters insolvency proceedings. On 22 June 2022 the Criminal Chamber (appeal no. 21-83.036, bankruptcy by manifestly irregular or incomplete accounting) recalled that “l’article L. 654-2, 5°, du code de commerce, qui incrimine le fait d’avoir tenu une comptabilité manifestement incomplète ou irrégulière au regard des dispositions légales, sanctionne tout manquement manifeste aux obligations comptables commis par le prévenu dès lors qu’il se trouve obligé de tenir une comptabilité en vertu d’une disposition légale” (Court of Cassation, Criminal Chamber, 22 June 2022, no. 21-83.036). And it added the sentence every foreign director should memorise: “l’obligation de tenir une comptabilité régulière en application de l’article L. 123-12 du code de commerce ne se limite pas à l’établissement des comptes annuels à la clôture de l’exercice, mais implique également l’enregistrement chronologique des mouvements affectant le patrimoine dans les livres comptables et l’inventaire périodique, de sorte que le délit de banqueroute par tenue d’une comptabilité manifestement incomplète ou irrégulière se trouve constitué avant ladite clôture lorsque sont constatés des manquements ou des irrégularités manifestes dans la tenue des livres comptables.” Translation: the duty of regular bookkeeping is not limited to drawing up year-end accounts; it includes chronological recording and periodic inventory, so the bankruptcy offence can be constituted before year-end where manifest irregularities are found in the books. Concretely: reconstructing plausible accounts from bank statements the night before the hearing, backdating meeting minutes, or signing accounts you never read can turn a curable filing delay into forgery, misuse of corporate assets or bankruptcy offences if the company is in difficulty. Repair honestly, with a professional, and keep the paper trail of everything you sign.
B. Stop it happening again: the yearly legal calendar your foreign-owned company must run like clockwork
A French company is a machine with a yearly legal calendar, and the foreign owner who treats it as a dormant holding is the one who receives injunctions. Put these four dates in writing, assign each to a named person, and review them at every board call. Closing date, usually 31 December: the accountant closes the books and prepares the draft accounts, the inventory and the management report. Approval deadline, within six months of closing, so normally 30 June for a December year-end: the shareholders meet or the sole shareholder signs, approves the accounts and votes the allocation of the result — profit carried forward, reserves, or dividends. Filing deadline, one month after approval, or two months for electronic filing through the Guichet unique: the approved documents go to the greffe and the BODACC notice is checked. Tax return deadline, running on its own track through the impots.gouv.fr portal (the French tax authority’s online service) with corporate tax instalments during the year: the accounts approval and the tax return use the same underlying figures but follow separate procedures, and filing one never files the other. The single most effective sentence a foreign founder can write to their accountant each January is: send me the dates of closing, of the approval meeting, and of the filing for this year, with the name of the person responsible for each. Files with named owners do not drift; files where “the accountant handles it” drift every year.
Three structural safeguards prevent recurrence. First, secure the registered office mail circuit. Many injunctions become catastrophes because the letter from the greffe arrived at a Paris domiciliation address, was scanned to an unread inbox, or was returned because the company moved without updating the RCS. If your company uses a domiciliation company (société de domiciliation, the regulated provider of registered-office addresses), confirm in writing that court and registry mail is forwarded within 48 hours to a monitored address, and update the RCS the week you move, not the quarter after. Second, calendarise the auditor question. A growing subsidiary crosses the thresholds for a mandatory commissaire aux comptes without noticing, and the accounts filed without the required auditor’s report are rejected, which restarts the whole breach cycle. Ask the accountant every year, in writing, whether the thresholds are met and whether a minority shareholder has requested an auditor. Third, monitor the public record as your counterparties do. Once a year, order a Kbis and check the BODACC deposit history for your SIREN number; the five minutes this takes are the same five minutes a bank analyst, a landlord or an acquirer spends before deciding your company is unreliable. Companies that miss filings also tend to miss the small publicity formalities that surround them — updated articles of association, changes of director, transfers of registered office — and each gap feeds the next letter from the registry.
For companies based in Paris and the Île-de-France region, two local points deserve attention. The Paris commercial court registry (greffe du tribunal de commerce de Paris) handles one of the heaviest volumes in France, and its detection of missing deposits is largely automated: do not count on administrative tolerance or on the idea that a small subsidiary passes unnoticed. Conversely, Paris offers the densest network of English-speaking experts-comptables and lawyers able to receive the injunction, appear before the court president in summary proceedings, and file the catch-up package within days. If your registered office is in Paris or the inner suburbs, say so to your counsel immediately: jurisdiction follows the registered office, the competent court is fixed, and the response must go to that specific greffe, not to a generic national helpline. Foreign owners sometimes try to fix a Paris injunction by writing in English to the INPI helpdesk; the helpdesk cannot suspend a court penalty clock. Only filing, notified to the court that issued the order, stops it.
A final word on cost, because foreign founders always ask what a missed filing really costs. The direct cost is the liquidated penalty, personal to the director, plus the lawyer’s and accountant’s fees for the catch-up — typically a few thousand euros for one missing year handled quickly, potentially far more where several years are missing or where the director ignored the order until the liquidation hearing. The indirect costs are heavier: a bank that discovers unpublished accounts can freeze a credit review, a landlord can refuse a lease renewal, an acquirer discounts the price or walks away, and in a later insolvency the missing or irregular accounting becomes the backbone of personal liability and bankruptcy proceedings, as the 2022 decision quoted above demonstrates. Against that stands the cost of prevention: one approval meeting a year, one electronic filing, one BODACC check. No foreign investment in France is so marginal that this calendar is optional, and no group structure abroad exempts the French entity from French publicity duties. The companies that thrive under French law are not those with the cleverest structure but those whose yearly paperwork is boring, dated, filed and publicly visible.
Conclusion
A missed annual accounts filing in France is a triple-layered problem — late approval, missing publicity, and a court penalty clock — but it follows a predictable script with a predictable exit. Check which link in the chain broke by demanding dated documents from your accountant and cross-checking the BODACC record; treat any letter from the greffe as a court injunction under penalty payment addressed to you personally, not as routine mail to the company; approve late rather than never, because French criminal law punishes persistent omission while mere delay in convening the meeting is no longer an offence; file the complete package electronically and prove compliance to the court with the BODACC notice in hand; and rebuild the yearly calendar — closing, approval within six months, filing within one or two months, tax return on its own track — with named owners and monitored mail. Foreign founders who run this calendar never hear from the court president; those who discover it through an injunction can still close the file cleanly if they move within days, with a French accountant for the figures and a French lawyer for the court. Your French company deserves the same administrative seriousness as the business it carries: file the accounts, watch the BODACC notice appear, and return to what brought you to France — running the company, not defending it.
Need a quick opinion on your case
If your French company received an injunction from the court registry, missed its accounts approval or filing, or faces a daily penalty you do not understand, get advice before the penalty grows. Our firm offers a telephone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer of the firm. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22 or write via our contact page. We assist foreign founders and companies in Paris and throughout the Île-de-France region, entirely in English.