On Thursday 28 August, the European Commission published a report analysing in detail the product conformity checks carried out by EU customs at external borders in 2024.
Of the 392,529 interventions carried out, 64% resulted in the suspension of the product. The proportion of small parcels, those that pass under the €150 threshold and are therefore exempt from customs duties (see EUROPE 13653/13), represents an extremely significant proportion of entries: 88.9% of imported products in 2024.
For every million small packages, only 1.2 are detected and declared as non-compliant, according to the report. China is always the first country from which these parcels originate.
The unprecedented explosion in e-commerce has become the number one problem for European customs, given the volume of goods arriving in the EU, which is unmanageable with current control methods.
The data in the report shows that customs compliance checks have been “increasing” since 2022 and that more and more products are being denied access to the European market (see EUROPE 13623/11). But this increase in controls is diluted by the huge influx of parcels from third countries.
To tackle these e-commerce problems, the Commission published a ‘roadmap’ in February, focusing in particular on reform of the European Customs Code, greater digitalisation of the system and greater and more intensive use of appropriate legislation, such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) (see EUROPE 13572/5).
The problem has also been taken seriously by the European Parliament (see EUROPE 13677/10) and the Council of the EU (see EUROPE 13631/15).
The report highlights another problem with the customs control system: the “disparity” in effectiveness between Member States, with some countries having no real controls at all, with a refusal rate of less than 0.1 per million products.
The European Commission said it had “opened a dialogue” with the “underperforming” countries to try to fill the gaps.
Without reform and digitalisation, the current system will not be able to protect European consumers effectively, says the report, who could be put at risk by the influx of these small, insufficiently controlled parcels.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/i62 (Original version in French by Isalia Stieffatre)