The letter from the Direction générale des douanes et des droits indirects, the DGDDI, French customs, rarely arrives in English. It speaks of an enquête statistique, a statistical survey, of DEBWEB2, of an état récapitulatif, a recapitulative statement, and of a deadline counted in jours ouvrables, working days. For a foreign founder whose French SAS, société par actions simplifiée, a simplified joint-stock company, or SARL, société à responsabilité limitée, a limited-liability company, has started shipping goods to Germany, Italy or Spain, the first reflex is to treat the letter as a formality the accountant will absorb. Since 1 January 2022 the old déclaration d’échanges de biens, the DEB, intra-EU goods declaration, has been split. One piece is fiscal and can take the VAT exemption off the intra-Community supply. The other is statistical and applies only if customs put the company in the sample and sent the lettre-avis, the prior notice letter.

This article is for the foreign owner who already has a French company, a SIRET, the fourteen-digit establishment number, a VAT number, and goods that move between metropolitan France and another EU Member State. The pillar guide on setting up a French company as a foreign founder remains the hub for bank account, Kbis, the official extract from the registre du commerce et des sociétés, the RCS, trade and companies register, VAT and the first hire. What follows is the missing filing in that calendar: the monthly customs reporting of intra-EU goods, how it differs from the CA3 and from a VIES check on the customer’s VAT number, and what to do when the DGDDI letter is already on the desk.

I. Do I have to file EMEBI, or only the VAT recapitulative statement, when my French company ships goods inside the EU?

A. When the recapitulative statement is mandatory from the first euro shipped

Intra-Community trade in goods is not a customs clearance at the border. Since 1 January 1993 there is no export declaration, in the customs sense, when a French company sends Union goods to a customer in another Member State. That does not mean there is no reporting. The fiscal reporting is the état récapitulatif des clients, the recapitulative statement of customers. Article 289 B of the Code général des impôts, the CGI, General Tax Code, in the version in force on 10 September 2026, opens with this duty: “Tout assujetti identifié à la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée doit déposer, dans un délai et selon des modalités fixés par décret, un état récapitulatif des clients, avec leur numéro d’identification à la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée, auxquels il a livré des biens dans les conditions prévues au I de l’article 262 ter ou auxquels des biens sont destinés dans les conditions prévues au III bis de l’article 256 et un état récapitulatif des clients auxquels il a fourni des services pour lesquels le preneur est redevable de la taxe dans un autre Etat membre de l’Union européenne en application de l’article 196 de la directive 2006/112/ CE du Conseil, du 28 novembre 2006, relative au système commun de taxe sur la valeur ajoutée.” Every person identified for VAT must file, within a time limit and according to procedures set by decree, a recapitulative statement of the customers, with their VAT identification numbers, to whom that person has supplied goods under article 262 ter I or to whom goods are destined under article 256 III bis, and a recapitulative statement of the customers to whom that person has supplied services for which the customer is liable for VAT in another Member State under article 196 of the VAT Directive. The goods statement is the ERTVA in the language of many practitioners. The services statement is the déclaration européenne de services, the DES, European services declaration. This article stays with goods, because that is what EMEBI measures. Services have their own DES on the same portal and the same 1788 A scale of fines; they are not the statistical survey.

The recapitulative statement is not triggered by a turnover threshold. The official Entreprendre service-public page on intra-Community customs VAT formalities is explicit: any VAT-able person that has made supplies of goods to another Member State must draw it up, including persons under the franchise en base, the VAT franchise for small businesses. It is not drawn up where the company has only made acquisitions, introductions of goods into France. Shipments out, expéditions, generate the statement. Introductions in, introductions, do not. A foreign-owned French SAS that only buys from a German supplier and never sells goods out of France therefore has no 289 B goods statement to file. The same SAS that invoices a Belgian customer for goods leaving a warehouse in Île-de-France does, from the first euro.

Why the statement exists is not bookkeeping hygiene. It is the French end of the EU information-exchange that lets the Member State of arrival tax the acquisition. The Conseil d’État, the French supreme administrative court, sitting in the 9th and 10th combined chambers on 1 June 2022, n° 459099, put that function in one sentence after quoting article 289 B: “Ces dispositions, qui ont été prises dans le cadre du dispositif de recoupement d’informations entre les Etats-membres de l’Union européenne destiné à leur permettre de contrôler la réalité des opérations intracommunautaires déclarées et de détecter les anomalies de facturation, imposent aux assujettis identifiés à la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée en France qui se livrent à des opérations intracommunautaires avec des redevables de la taxe dans un autre Etat-membre, de déposer chaque mois un état récapitulatif pour ces livraisons de biens et prestations de services.” Those provisions, adopted as part of the cross-checking of information between EU Member States so that they can verify the reality of declared intra-Community transactions and detect invoicing anomalies, require VAT-identified taxable persons in France who carry out intra-Community transactions with persons liable for the tax in another Member State to file each month a recapitulative statement for those supplies of goods and services. The Court refused to send a priority constitutionality question on the 750 euro fine to the Conseil constitutionnel. The reporting is treated as essential to the fight against fraud, not as optional paperwork.

The same statement is a condition of the VAT exemption on the outbound supply. Article 262 ter of the CGI I, 1° first grants the exemption: “Les livraisons de biens expédiés ou transportés sur le territoire d’un autre Etat membre de l’Union européenne à destination d’un autre assujetti ou d’une personne morale non assujettie qui est identifié aux fins de la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée dans un autre Etat membre que celui du départ de l’expédition ou du transport et a communiqué au fournisseur son numéro d’identification à la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée.” Supplies of goods dispatched or transported to another Member State to another taxable person or non-taxable legal person that is identified for VAT in a Member State other than that of departure and that has communicated its VAT number to the supplier are exempt. The next sentence is the one foreign founders skip: “L’exonération ne s’applique pas lorsque le fournisseur n’a pas déposé l’état récapitulatif mentionné à l’article 289 B ou lorsque l’état récapitulatif qu’il a souscrit ne contient pas les informations mentionnées au II du même article 289 B, à moins que celui-ci ne puisse dûment justifier son manquement à l’administration.” The exemption does not apply where the supplier has not filed the article 289 B statement, or where the statement filed does not contain the information listed in article 289 B II, unless the supplier can duly justify the failure to the authorities. A missed DEBWEB2 filing is therefore not only a 750 euro line. It is a legal argument for the French tax authorities to put French VAT back on invoices that were issued at zero because “the customer is in the EU”.

The exemption has other conditions that the statement does not replace. The goods must actually leave France. The customer must be a taxable person, or a non-taxable legal person, identified for VAT in the Member State of arrival, and must have given that number to the supplier. Article 262 ter I also withdraws the exemption “lorsqu’il est démontré que le fournisseur savait ou ne pouvait ignorer que le destinataire présumé de l’expédition ou du transport n’avait pas d’activité réelle”: where it is shown that the supplier knew or could not have been unaware that the supposed consignee had no real activity. The Cour administrative d’appel de Douai, the Douai administrative court of appeal, 4th chamber, 18 March 2021, n° 19DA00319, restated the two classic conditions after quoting article 262 ter: “l’exonération de taxe sur la valeur ajoutée des livraisons de biens à un destinataire établi sur le territoire d’un autre Etat membre de l’Union européenne est subordonnée, notamment, à la condition, d’une part, que l’acquéreur de ces biens soit assujetti à cette taxe ou ait la qualité de personne morale non assujettie et ne bénéficiant pas dans l’Etat membre dans lequel elle est établie d’un régime dérogatoire l’autorisant à ne pas soumettre à la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée ses acquisitions intracommunautaires et, d’autre part, que le bien ait été expédié ou transporté hors de France par le vendeur, par l’acquéreur ou par un tiers pour leur compte, à destination d’un autre Etat membre de l’Union européenne.” Exemption is subject, in particular, to the customer being a taxable person or a non-taxable legal person that does not benefit in its Member State from a special scheme allowing it not to VAT its intra-Community acquisitions, and to the goods having been dispatched or transported out of France by the seller, the buyer or a third party on their behalf, to another Member State. CMR notes, transport invoices, Incoterms that actually match the physical flow, warehouse exit records and the customer’s valid VAT number all belong in the file. The recapitulative statement is the monthly legal photograph of that file. It is not a substitute for proof that the goods moved.

Article 289 B II lists what the goods statement must contain: the supplier’s VAT number; each customer’s VAT number in the Member State where the goods were supplied; for each purchaser, the total amount of the supplies, declared for the month in which the tax became chargeable in the other Member State; the data required for transfers treated as supplies; regularisations under article 272; and, for call-off or consignment stocks under article 256 III bis, the customer’s number and any change in the information supplied. Amounts are in euros. Regime code 21 on DEBWEB2 is the ordinary case of a supply exempt in France and taxable in the Member State of arrival. A foreign parent that moves stock from a French warehouse to its own German warehouse is not “selling” in the commercial sense; it may still be a transfer assimilated to a supply under article 262 ter I, 2° and article 256 III, and it still belongs on the statement. Amazon FBA, fulfilment by Amazon, and similar platform flows are the practical illustration: the goods leave France, the customer is in another Member State or the stock is transferred, and the statement is due even if no classic invoice was issued to an end consumer in that month.

Article 269 of the CGI, 2, d, fixes when VAT on the exempt intra-Community supply and on the intra-Community acquisition becomes chargeable: “Pour les acquisitions intracommunautaires et pour les livraisons et les transferts exonérés en application du I de l’article 262 ter, le 15 du mois suivant celui au cours duquel s’est produit le fait générateur. Toutefois, la taxe devient exigible lors de la délivrance de la facture, à condition qu’elle précède la date d’exigibilité prévue au premier alinéa et qu’il ne s’agisse pas d’une facture d’acompte.” For intra-Community acquisitions and for supplies and transfers exempt under article 262 ter I, the 15th of the month following that in which the chargeable event occurred. VAT nevertheless becomes chargeable on the issue of the invoice if that invoice is issued before that date and is not a deposit invoice. The month of reference for the recapitulative statement follows that chargeability. Entreprendre service-public restates the operational rule: the statement and, where the company is in the EMEBI sample, the survey are monthly filings transmitted to customs from the 1st and at the latest on the 10th working day of the month following the month of reference. Working days exclude Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays in France, not in the founder’s home State. A New York headquarters that treats “the 10th” as a calendar date will file late in any month that starts with a weekend or a French public holiday.

B. When EMEBI applies: the customs sample, the letter-avis, and how this differs from CA3 and VIES

EMEBI is the enquête mensuelle sur les échanges de biens intra-Union européenne, the monthly survey on intra-EU trade in goods. It replaced the statistical side of the DEB from the January 2022 collection. The arrêté of 27 January 2022, published in the Journal officiel, repealed the Annex IV CGI rules on the old déclaration d’échanges de biens, the DEB, intra-EU goods declaration. It applies to periods beginning after 1 January 2022 for both the article 289 B recapitulative statement and the statistical intra-Community trade declaration. The old single DEB, with its introduction and expedition thresholds, is not the law that applies to a 2026 flow.

Who must answer EMEBI is narrower than who must file the recapitulative statement. The DGDDI page on responding to the survey is unambiguous. A list of companies subject to the survey is defined each year. That list is the échantillon, the sample. Companies that form part of the selected sample and that have previously received the customs administration’s notice letter informing them of their obligation must respond to the EMEBI statistical survey, according to the DGDDI page on the procedure. Entreprendre service-public adds the practical timing: the letter is generally sent in December of year n-1, but it can arrive at any other time, in particular where the person was created during year n or has seen a material change in its intra-EU goods flows. A newly incorporated French subsidiary of a US or UK parent that starts shipping in March can be pulled into the sample mid-year. Until that letter arrives, there is no EMEBI to file. After it arrives, there is, every month, including months with no intra-EU goods movement. Customs requires a mois sans réponse statistique, a month with no statistical response, to be entered on the portal rather than silence.

Commercial pages still quote a 460,000 euro Intrastat-style threshold as if it automatically created the EMEBI duty. That figure belonged to the old DEB world. The customs administration now describes a sampled survey after a lettre-avis. A foreign founder who has not received that letter and who files EMEBI “to be safe” is not complying with a duty that does not exist; the founder is also not excused from the recapitulative statement, which does exist from the first euro of shipments. The two filings live on the same DEBWEB2 portal and are often completed in the same session, EMEBI first when the company is in the sample, because some boxes of the recapitulative statement can then be pre-filled for regime code 21. Pre-filling is not a reason to skip the statement when the company is outside the sample.

EMEBI collects physical-flow data that the recapitulative statement does not: the combined nomenclature of the goods, country of destination or consignment, net mass in kilograms, supplementary units, département of departure or destination, country of origin. Northern Ireland is inside the EMEBI field even though it is not an EU Member State in the political sense; Entreprendre service-public says so expressly. The survey is founded on the law of 7 June 1951 on statistics, loi n° 51-711. Article 6 of that law, as presented by customs on the official EMEBI page, protects the answers: the particulars collected for the survey are not to be used for a tax audit or for economic prosecution. That sentence is the legal wall between EMEBI and a VAT inspection. It is also why a founder must not treat EMEBI as a second CA3. The CA3 is the VAT return under article 287 of the CGI: “Tout redevable de la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée identifié conformément aux dispositions combinées des articles 286 ter et 286 ter A est tenu de remettre au service des impôts dont il dépend et dans le délai fixé par arrêté une déclaration conforme au modèle prescrit par l’administration.” Every person liable for VAT identified under articles 286 ter and 286 ter A must send the tax office on which that person depends, within the time limit set by order, a return in the form prescribed by the administration. The CA3 goes to the direction générale des finances publiques, the DGFiP, the public-finance directorate, on impots.gouv.fr. EMEBI and the recapitulative statement go to the DGDDI on douane.gouv.fr. A missed CA3 and a missed recapitulative statement are two different missed filings, with two different addressees and two different penalty articles.

VIES, the VAT Information Exchange System, is a third tool. It tells the supplier whether a given EU VAT number is valid on a given day. It does not prove that the goods moved, that the customer had a real activity, or that the recapitulative statement was filed. The Cour administrative d’appel de Marseille, 4th chamber, 29 September 2020, n° 19MA00607, had to deal with a company that had claimed the article 262 ter exemption on sales invoiced to Italian companies. After a tax audit, the authorities denied the exemption. The court held that the administration had established that the claimed intra-Community dispatches “n’ont, dans leur ensemble, pas eu lieu”, did not, taken as a whole, take place. Checking VIES after the first invoices was not enough: “la SARL BC France, en se bornant à vérifier la validité des numéros de taxe sur la valeur ajoutée intracommunautaires de ses clients, de surcroit postérieurement à l’émission des premières factures en ce qui concerne les sociétés CDI Tecnology et Venom Distribuzione, et à recueillir des informations auprès de la chambre de commerce et d’industrie italienne postérieurement à l’émission de ces factures, ne peut être regardée” as having done what the exemption requires. The court then upheld the 40 percent surcharge for deliberate breach under article 1729 of the CGI, because the company “ne pouvait ignorer sa participation à un circuit de fraude à la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée”, could not have been unaware of its participation in a VAT fraud circuit. A foreign founder who sells goods into the EU through a thin counterparty, who never sees a warehouse, and who treats a green VIES tick as the entire compliance file is in that fact pattern, not in a “missed form” fact pattern. The recapitulative statement still has to be filed. It will not save a supply that never left France.

Article 256 of the CGI I remains the root of the tax: “Sont soumises à la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée les livraisons de biens et les prestations de services effectuées à titre onéreux par un assujetti agissant en tant que tel.” Supplies of goods and services for consideration by a taxable person acting as such are subject to VAT. Article 256 bis I then brings intra-Community acquisitions into French VAT when the purchaser is a taxable person or a non-taxable legal person and the seller is a taxable person who does not benefit from the small-business franchise in the Member State of departure. Article 286 ter identifies by an individual number “Tout assujetti qui effectue des livraisons de biens ou des prestations de services lui ouvrant droit à déduction” and, among others, persons who make intra-Community acquisitions taxable in France. Without that number there is no 289 B statement to file and no 262 ter exemption to claim. A foreign company that has not yet obtained a French VAT number is not in the EMEBI sample; it is in the VAT registration queue, and it should not invoice intra-Community goods as if the exemption were already available.

In Paris and Île-de-France the operational map is local even when the shareholder sits in London or Delaware. The company’s SIRET is attached to an établissement, an establishment, whose address determines the service des impôts des entreprises, the SIE, the corporate tax office, that receives the CA3, and the customs pole that handles DEBWEB2 incidents. The Conseil d’État decision of 1 June 2022 on the 1788 A fine started in the tribunal administratif de Paris, the Paris administrative court. A company whose siège social, registered office, is in Paris, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis or Val-de-Marne will litigate a tax or penalty dispute in that court or in the neighbouring administrative courts of the inner suburbs, not in the commercial court, the tribunal des activités économiques, which does not hear VAT. The Kbis that lists the registered office and the establishments is the document customs and the SIE will match against the DEBWEB2 profile. If the company opened a warehouse in another département without updating the RCS, the EMEBI boxes on the département of departure will not match the Kbis, and that mismatch is exactly the kind of “inexactitude” that article 1788 A prices at 15 euros a line.

II. How do I file from abroad, and what if I missed the tenth working day?

A. DEBWEB2, the monthly calendar, the documents and a third-party filer

Filing is electronic. Article 289 B IV A says so: “Les états récapitulatifs mentionnés aux II et III du présent article sont transmis par voie électronique.” The recapitulative statements mentioned in II and III of this article are transmitted by electronic means. A paper option remains only for persons under the VAT franchise, and only for the services statement, on a customs form. A foreign-owned SAS that is on the real VAT regime has no paper route. The portal is DEBWEB2 on douane.gouv.fr. The founder, or the French président or gérant, manager, must first create a personal account on the DGDDI portal, then attach the company, then mandate whoever will actually key the lines. Customs accepts a tiers déclarant, a third-party filer, for EMEBI without any special licence. The DGDDI page states that the company liable for the information may delegate its EMEBI response to any third party, a separate company and/or a service provider, that the choice of filer is not subject to any particular condition, and that the filer must be expressly mandated. The identification of the liable company must still appear on the declaration. Delegation does not shift legal responsibility: each company keeps the legal responsibility for answering the statistical survey even if it splits the task among several portal accounts or entrusts the task to a third-party filer.

From abroad, the mandate is the document that unblocks the portal. A US parent that wants its Irish shared-service centre or its French expert-comptable, chartered accountant, to file must put that mandate in writing, keep it, and make sure the DEBWEB2 profile names the French company as the redevable, the person liable, not the service centre. Article 289 B IV B then imposes a six-year retention duty: “Les documents nécessaires à l’établissement de l’état récapitulatif mentionné au même II doivent être conservés par les assujettis pendant un délai de six ans à compter de la date de l’opération ayant donné lieu à cet état.” The documents needed to draw up the goods recapitulative statement must be kept by taxable persons for six years from the date of the transaction that gave rise to that statement. Transport documents, invoices, contracts of deposit, stock-transfer notes and the VIES screenshots dated the day of invoicing belong in that file. A screenshot taken after a tax auditor has written is the pattern the Marseille court refused to treat as contemporaneous diligence.

The calendar is not a courtesy. Customs publishes a yearly table of the last filing day, counted as the 10th working day after the month of reference. Responses must be received at the latest on the 10th working day following the reference period, according to the DGDDI page. They cannot be filed, finally recorded, before the first day of the month following the month of reference. You cannot pre-file January in January. You cannot treat a draft saved on the portal as a filing. The button that matters is the definitive recording. A foreign founder who leaves a draft with the accountant on the 8th and discovers on the 12th that nobody clicked is in the 750 euro box, not in a “we tried” box.

The data to assemble before that click are operational, not legal theory. For each shipment: the customer’s VAT number as it stood on the invoice date, checked on VIES that day; the tax value, net of VAT, plus the ancillary costs that form part of the taxable amount, insurance, freight, file fees, rounded to the nearest euro, with a value that rounds to zero left undeclared; the regime code; for EMEBI, the eight-digit combined nomenclature, net mass, supplementary units, département of departure, country of origin. A value of 0.48 euro that rounds to 0 must not be declared, according to Entreprendre service-public. Commercial regularisations and stock transfers under deposit contracts have their own lines. Where invoices and regularisations concern the same customer and the same month, they may be declared on separate lines. None of this can be reconstructed from a US GAAP pack that only shows “EU sales”. The French company needs a flow-by-flow extract from the warehouse or the 3PL, third-party logistics provider, aligned on the invoice date and on article 269 chargeability, not on the US parent’s revenue-recognition date.

A company in the EMEBI sample that has no intra-EU goods in a given month still files. Silence is a failure, not a nil return. The portal entry is the mois sans réponse statistique. A company outside the sample that has no shipments in a given month has no goods recapitulative statement to file for that month. If it has intra-EU services for which the customer is liable for VAT in another Member State, the DES remains due. If it has only French domestic sales, neither statement nor EMEBI is due. The founder should not pay a provider to file empty EMEBI returns for a company that never received the lettre-avis. The founder should pay someone to watch the mailbox, including the electronic mailbox attached to the DGDDI account, because the letter that creates the EMEBI duty can arrive in December or in May.

Paris and Île-de-France add a practical constraint that a Delaware board meeting will not see. Many foreign-owned companies domicile the siège social with a société de domiciliation, a registered-office company, in Paris 8th or 9th arrondissement, while the goods sit in a bonded or ordinary warehouse in Seine-et-Marne, Val-d’Oise or at Roissy. The EMEBI line asks for the département of departure of the goods, not the département of the registered office. The CFE, cotisation foncière des entreprises, the local business tax, follows the establishment. The recapitulative statement follows the VAT number of the legal person. Three different maps. If the warehouse is an établissement secondaire, a secondary establishment, that was never put on the Kbis, the company already has an RCS problem next to the customs problem. The incorporation pillar and the secondary-establishment filing are the place to repair the map; DEBWEB2 will not repair it by itself.

B. The 750 euro fine, the lost VAT exemption, and how to regularize or contest

The fine for not producing the recapitulative statement is in article 1788 A of the CGI, not in a customs circular. Paragraph 1, a, is the sentence that matches the DGDDI letter: “Le défaut de production dans les délais des états prévus à l’article 289 B.” Failure to produce the article 289 B statements on time entails a fine of 750 euros. The same paragraph raises that fine to 1,500 euros if the return is still not produced within thirty days of a formal notice. Paragraph 2, a, prices each omission or inaccuracy found in those statements at 15 euros, with a cap of 1,500 euros. Entreprendre service-public presents the same 750 / 1,500 / 15 euro scale for a missing or inaccurate EMEBI response. Article 1788 A itself, in the text retrieved on 10 September 2026, names only the “états prévus à l’article 289 B”. A defence that EMEBI is a statistical survey under loi n° 51-711, and that article 6 of that law forbids the use of the answers for tax audit, is a serious defence on the statistical side. It is not a defence against 1788 A on the recapitulative statement. Mixing the two in a single letter of complaint is how a good point is lost.

The Conseil d’État, 1 June 2022, n° 459099, refused to treat the 750 euro monthly fine as constitutionally disproportionate. After recalling the information-exchange purpose of article 289 B, the court held, in the decision published at Conseil d’État, 1 June 2022, n° 459099, that the amounts set by the contested provisions are not manifestly disproportionate, even though the penalty may be imposed every month and regardless of any tax evaded and of the value of the goods or services exchanged: “les montants fixés par les dispositions contestées ne présentent pas un caractère manifestement disproportionné, alors même que la sanction est susceptible d’être infligée tous les mois et indépendamment de l’existence de droits éludés et de la valeur des biens ou services échangés.” The dispositif is blunt: “Il n’y a pas lieu de renvoyer au Conseil constitutionnel la question de la conformité à la Constitution du a du 1 de l’article 1788 A du code général des impôts.” There is no need to refer to the Constitutional Council the question of the conformity with the Constitution of article 1788 A, 1, a. A foreign founder who writes that 750 euros a month is confiscatory for a small SAS is repeating an argument that has already failed in the supreme administrative court. The usable arguments are different: the company was not a taxable person identified under 286 ter; there was no intra-Community supply in the month; the filing was made on time on DEBWEB2 and customs’ receipt is in the file; the mise en demeure never reached the company; the inaccuracies are not inaccuracies because the regime code matches article 262 ter; the person who signed the customs letter did not have authority.

The heavier threat is the loss of the 262 ter exemption. If the statement was not filed, or was filed without the article 289 B II information, article 262 ter I withdraws the exemption unless the supplier can duly justify the failure to the authorities: “à moins que celui-ci ne puisse dûment justifier son manquement à l’administration.” The escape is a due justification of the failure, not a claim that the CA3 already showed intra-Community sales. Justification means: the goods did leave; the customer was identified; the VAT numbers were valid; the omission was a portal or mandate incident, repaired as soon as it was known; the missing lines have been filed. It does not mean: we checked VIES later. The Marseille court treated a post-invoice VIES printout and a post-invoice Italian chamber-of-commerce enquiry as too late. A regularisation on DEBWEB2, line by line, with the month of reference correctly chosen under article 269, is the first mechanical step. The second is a written explanation to the customs office and, if a tax auditor is already in the file, to the SIE, attaching the transport proof. The third, if a proposed assessment denies 262 ter, is a claim, a réclamation, under the Livre des procédures fiscales, the tax-procedure book, within the ordinary time limits, and then, if needed, the tribunal administratif. That litigation is a VAT dispute, not a customs seizure. It is also not the place to argue that EMEBI answers were used against the company, unless there is evidence that customs broke article 6 of the 1951 statistics law. The wall between statistics and tax audit is real. It is not a shield against a 262 ter reassessment built on invoices, CMRs and bank flows.

A mise en demeure that raises the fine from 750 to 1,500 euros starts a thirty-day clock. Article 1788 A 1 a is the clock. The notice must be answered by producing the statement, not by a letter that promises to produce it. If the company never received the notice because the DGDDI account still shows a domiciliation address that stopped forwarding mail, the first job is to prove non-receipt and to update the address on the portal, on the Kbis and with the SIE. A foreign président who has never logged into douane.gouv.fr will not see the electronic notice. Appointing a French mandataire, a representative with a written power of attorney, on both the DGDDI portal and the impots.gouv.fr space is the structural fix, not an emergency click on the 29th day.

Contesting the 15 euro lines requires a different file. Each inaccuracy is a line. The cap is 1,500 euros per statement. A company that shipped to forty customers with a wrong regime code is at the cap, not at 600 euros. The defence is that the line is accurate under 289 B II, or that the value rounding follows the official rule, or that the customer’s number was the number communicated at the time of supply. A defence that “our ERP cannot split by VAT number” is not a legal defence. Changing the ERP, or exporting a side spreadsheet that the third-party filer can key, is the operational answer. For EMEBI, if the company was never in the sample, the answer to a demand is the absence of a lettre-avis. Asking customs to produce the letter is not aggressive. It is the condition the administration itself published.

Where the auditor has gone beyond missing forms and alleges that the customer had no real activity, the file changes register. Article 262 ter I then withdraws the exemption because the supplier knew or could not have been unaware. The Douai court recalled that the goods must have left France and that the purchaser must be a genuine taxable person. The Marseille court accepted, on the facts, that Italian “taxi” companies, mismatched delivery addresses, never-issued VAT numbers and a garage in Menton presented as a warehouse added up to dispatches that did not take place, and that the 40 percent article 1729 surcharge for deliberate breach was made out. That is no longer an EMEBI article. It is a fraud-circuit article. A foreign parent that discovers this pattern in its French subsidiary needs counsel, a hold on further zero-rated shipments to those counterparties, and a reconstruction of every CMR before anyone files a comforting nil EMEBI. Filing a statistical survey that describes goods that never moved is not regularisation. It is another inaccurate statement.

The order of work, when the letter is already there, is therefore short. Read whether the letter is a lettre-avis creating an EMEBI duty, a reminder of a 289 B statement, a mise en demeure under 1788 A, or a tax-audit notice from the SIE. Log into DEBWEB2 and see what was actually recorded. File the missing month, including a nil statistical month if the company is in the sample. Collect the six-year pack of invoices and transport documents. Check VIES as of the invoice dates, not today. Write the justification under the last sentence of article 262 ter I, 1° if exemption is in play. Calendar the thirty days if a mise en demeure has started. Do not wait for the US parent’s quarterly close. The 10th working day is a French working day, and the 30th day after the notice is a calendar count that does not care about a board meeting in another time zone.

Conclusion

Intra-EU goods leaving a French company are free of border formalities. They are not free of reporting. The recapitulative statement in article 289 B is mandatory from the first euro of shipments, electronic, monthly, and a condition of the article 262 ter exemption unless the failure is duly justified. EMEBI is a sampled statistical survey that exists only after a customs lettre-avis; it collects kilograms and nomenclature that the VAT statement does not, and its answers are protected by article 6 of the 1951 statistics law against use in a tax audit. The CA3, VIES and DEBWEB2 are three different machines. Pressing one does not feed the others. The fine in article 1788 A is 750 euros, then 1,500 after a thirty-day notice, and 15 euros a line up to 1,500. The Conseil d’État has already refused to treat that scale as constitutionally excessive. The deeper loss is French VAT on supplies that were invoiced at zero, plus, where the customer was a shell, the 40 percent surcharge. A foreign founder who ships goods from France needs a mandate on douane.gouv.fr, a calendar of the 10th working day, a six-year pack of transport proof, and a person who clicks enregistrement définitif. The rest is litigation, and litigation is slower than a monthly filing.

Need a quick opinion on your case

A telephone consultation with a lawyer of the firm can be arranged within 48 hours to read the DGDDI letter, the DEBWEB2 history and the intra-Community invoices, and to separate a 1788 A fine from a 262 ter reassessment.

Call +33 6 46 60 58 22 (Maître Reda Kohen) or write through the contact form. The firm advises in Paris and Île-de-France, including where the registered office, the warehouse and the SIE sit in different départements of the region.