Exceptional business support measures – Customs Payment facilities to help economic operators through the health crisis

By Stanislas ROQUEBERT

The customs administration provides for exceptional business support measures – Payment facilities to help economic operators through the health crisis: a broad scope and a remarkable action plan.

These measures have a very broad scope of application as they can :

• cover all types of duties and taxes collected by the customs administration, including customs duties, indirect taxes, internal consumption taxes, environmental taxes, etc. ;
• be of any kind: payment by instalments, adjustment, deferred payment, suspension, etc. ;
• cover several months (unlimited period at this stage);
• be complementary to other measures for deferring payment of a general nature (i.e. customs clearance procedures, etc.).

On the other hand, in order to benefit from these measures, operators must meet certain formal and substantive conditions:

• as regards form, the operator must send the customs local office in charge of collection the form provided for this purpose – we recommend also sending an explanatory letter justifying the economic need to obtain these measures, with supporting figures ;
• on the substance, the request must be motivated by a critical situation and proven financial difficulties.

Each application will be analysed on a case-by-case basis by the customs authorities, which is quite exceptional and demonstrates remarkable adaptation.

Finally, we recommend that we should also “take advantage” of the confinement to consider the implementation of optimisation measures that already exist but are not used enough despite the proposals of the administration, in particular:

• the benefit of suspensive customs procedures / reliefs (storage, repair or transformation under suspension of duties and taxes for non-EU goods re-exported after these operations) ;
• the request for reverse charge of VAT on imports (cash flow gain);
• requests for tariff suspension (for cases of taxed imports when there is no supply in the EU);
• the benefit of preferential origin (reduced or zero customs duties) provided for in the Free Trade Agreements in force with certain countries (possible change of sourcing).

This publication has been prepared for general guidance on matters of general interest only and does not constitute professional advice. You should not act on the basis of the information contained in this publication without obtaining specific professional advice.

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