On Tuesday 15 September 2026, at 9.40 a.m., two officers from a regional investigation unit arrive at the reception of a lighting importer in Villeurbanne: forty-two employees, eleven million euros in turnover, a single supplier in Shenzhen. They ask for the customs declarations for the last three years, the purchase invoices, the trade mark licence agreement and the statements of royalties paid to the licensor. The managing director is in Milan. The accountant opens the meeting room, brings out the files, answers the questions put to her and, at 6 p.m., signs a four-page document she has not reread. Six months later, the notice of investigation findings claims 410,000 euros in duties, on the ground that the trade mark royalties should have been added to the customs value.
There is nothing exceptional about this scenario. Licence fees form part of the customs value where they are a condition of sale (Art. 71(1)(c) of the Union Customs Code), and the question is often decided by what the company said, or allowed to be written down, on the first day. This page describes, using the numbering introduced by Ordinance No. 2026-265 of 8 April 2026, what the officers may require, what may be refused, and how to prepare the adversarial phase that follows the inspection.
1. Identify the power being exercised: the first question to ask the officers
A customs inspection is not a legal category. The term covers very different powers, each with its own conditions, limits and penalties, and the first thing to do, before even opening a file, is to ask the officers on what legal basis they are acting. The question is legitimate; no officer takes offence at it.
The new Code groups these powers in Title II of Book IV. The right of disclosure (Art. L. 421-1, formerly Art. 65) allows officers to require documents. Access to premises and places used for business purposes (Art. L. 423-1, formerly Art. 63 ter) allows them to enter the company to search for offences. The home search (Art. L. 423-6 et seq., formerly Art. 64) requires an order from the liberty and custody judge (juge des libertés et de la détention) and is closer to a search warrant. The right to inspect goods, means of transport and persons (Art. L. 422-1 et seq., formerly Art. 60) mainly concerns the border, ports, airports and the movement of goods; it was entirely rewritten after the Constitutional Council declared former Article 60 unconstitutional (Decision No. 2022-1010 QPC of 22 September 2022).
The distinction changes everything. Under the right of disclosure, the company hands over what is requested. Under the right of access to premises, the officers search for themselves. Under a search order, they seize. An officer holding a mere request for disclosure does not search the offices, open cupboards or copy the server; an officer exercising the right of access may require any document relevant to the investigation to be handed over and may take copies (Art. L. 423-4). Confusing the two means either obstructing a lawful power or handing over far more than the law requires.
Next, note in writing and in real time the time of arrival, the names and grades of the officers, their unit, any written order presented and the list of documents requested. This record will be useful later, when what actually happened has to be compared with what the official customs report (procès-verbal) says.
2. The right of disclosure: hand everything over, nothing more
The right of disclosure is the most frequently used and the least understood power. Article L. 421-1 allows officers holding at least the grade of controller to require, from any person directly or indirectly concerned by operations falling within the remit of customs, “all documents of any kind, whatever the medium”, on site or by correspondence, including electronic correspondence. They may copy or seize them. A category C officer may exercise it only on the written order of an inspector, and that order must be shown to the company: failing that, the request is not valid.
The scope is broad, but it has a limit that is often forgotten: the right of disclosure covers existing documents. It does not oblige the company to produce an analysis, to reconstruct a management dashboard or to explain its transfer pricing policy orally. A dated written reply listing the documents handed over and stating that the others do not exist in the form requested is worth more than an hour of improvised explanations.
Refusal is costly. Article R. 515-2, which restates former Article 413 bis, punishes refusal to disclose, and “any conduct obstructing” disclosure, with a fine of 3,700 euros, and provides that the fine is incurred as many times as there are requests left without a complete answer. The court may also order production subject to a penalty payment of up to 150 euros per day (Art. R. 515-3). Refusal is therefore almost always a mistake; sorting the documents never is.
Professional secrecy can be relied on only with care. Correspondence between the company and its lawyer, protected by Article 66-5 of the Law of 31 December 1971, need not be handed over; it must be identified, set aside and stated in writing, document by document. Advice from a non-lawyer adviser, internal memos from the finance department or exchanges with the customs broker enjoy no equivalent protection.
The practical rule fits in one sentence: hand over what is requested, list what is handed over, and keep a copy of each document in the exact order in which it was given. A company that does not know, three months later, what customs holds is negotiating blind.
3. Access to business premises: hours, public prosecutor, private areas
When the officers no longer merely request documents but enter the company to search for an offence, they act on the basis of Article L. 423-1. The text reserves this power to category A or B officers, category C officers being allowed to take part only when accompanied. It covers premises and places used for business purposes, land, warehouses, means of transport used for business purposes and their loads.
Three safeguards govern the operation, and each may ground a finding of nullity if it was not observed. First, the hours: access takes place between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., unless the premises are open to the public or a production, handling, storage or marketing activity is under way (Art. L. 423-2). Second, the public prosecutor must be informed before the operation, which allows the prosecutor to object to it; an official report describing how the inspection was conducted is sent to the prosecutor within five days, and a copy is given to the company within the same period (Art. L. 423-3). Finally, the private part of the premises may be entered only with the occupant’s consent, obtained on the spot and recorded in a signed statement annexed to the official report (Art. L. 423-1, para. 3).
This last rule matters more than it seems in an SME where the managing director’s office, laptop and sometimes home merge with the business. There is no obligation to consent. A polite refusal, duly recorded, does not amount to obstruction of officers in the performance of their duties, whereas consent given in haste opens to the officers what only a court order would have allowed them to search.
Documents handed over in this context are returned when the action for the application of tax penalties is extinguished or, if criminal proceedings are brought, with the authorisation of the judicial authority (Art. L. 423-4). In other words, a complete copy must be kept before they leave the premises, because the company may need them for years, and above all to defend itself.
4. The interview: voluntary, but not trivial
Officers almost never settle for documents. They want to hear from the managing director, the logistics manager, the person who enters the declarations or who negotiates with the supplier. The form of that interview is not a matter of indifference.
Where there are plausible reasons to suspect that a person has committed or attempted to commit a customs offence, and that person is not held in customs detention, he or she may be questioned about those facts only after receiving the information provided for in Article 61-1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (Art. L. 433-1, formerly Art. 67 F): the legal classification, presumed date and place of the offence, the right to leave the premises at any time, the right to remain silent, the right to an interpreter and, where the offence is a délit punishable by imprisonment, the right to be assisted by a lawyer. If suspicion arises during the interview, this information must be given without delay (Art. L. 433-2). The notification is recorded in the official report.
The new Code adds a requirement that every managing director should know. Where an official report records an offence, the right to remain silent must have been notified to the person concerned, and this must be stated in the report (Art. L. 443-3 and L. 443-7, last paragraph). An interview conducted without that notification weakens the document that records it.
Experience teaches a simple lesson. What is said in the meeting room on the first day reappears, almost word for word, in the official report notifying the offence several months later, and the statements recorded in an official report are deemed accurate until proven otherwise (Art. L. 444-1, para. 2). The employee who answers “yes, we knew the royalty was linked to the purchases” to cut short a difficult interview may have sealed the case. Do not answer a question unless you know the exact answer; say you will check, and then check.
Read before signing. The official report can be corrected; the person may have observations recorded; he or she may refuse to sign, which will be noted and carries no penalty in itself. A signature is not an admission. But it makes it very difficult afterwards to argue that one’s words were misreported.
5. The adversarial exchange: the thirty days that decide the case
An inspection rarely ends with an immediate decision. Before any assessment, the administration must allow the company to put its point of view. The applicable regime depends on the nature of the charge (Art. L. 311-1, formerly Art. 67 A).
For duties and taxes whose chargeable event is importation or exportation, that is to say most customs duties, the adversarial exchange is governed by the Union Customs Code: Article 22(6) requires the person to be informed of the grounds on which the administration intends to base its decision and to be given a period in which to express a point of view, set at thirty days by Article 8 of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2015/2446 and reduced to twenty-four hours where the decision concerns goods under control for which no declaration has been lodged. For the other charges collected by customs, the national Code provides for an oral or written procedure: the person liable is informed of the grounds and the amount of the proposed assessment (Art. L. 311-3), may ask for a written communication (Art. L. 311-4) and then has thirty days to submit observations on a reasoned assessment proposal (Art. L. 311-7). If the administration rejects those observations, its reply must state reasons (Art. L. 311-8).
The Cour de cassation has just clarified the scope of this safeguard in a published judgment. It holds that the administration fulfils its obligation when it informs the person liable of the grounds and of the right to access the documents and information on which it intends to base its decision, and it set aside a court of appeal judgment that had annulled a notice of assessment (avis de mise en recouvrement, AMR) without examining whether that statement appeared in the notice of investigation findings (Cass. com., 17 June 2026, no. 25-10.751, published in the Bulletin). The practical lesson is clear: the right of access is worth something only if it is exercised. A company receiving the notice must request in writing, within the first week, disclosure of all the documents referred to; otherwise it will not be able to complain later that the administration did not show them.
Thirty days is short to reconstruct three years of imports. Yet this is the moment when the case is most often won, because the administration has not yet commenced contentious proceedings, its inspection services can still revise their position without losing face before their hierarchy or a court, and a reasoned, quantified reply, based on the texts and on documents the administration did not have (the licence agreement reread clause by clause, proof that the royalty pays for a trade mark used on the French market and not for a purchase condition imposed by the supplier, the correspondence showing that the licensor and the Chinese seller are unrelated, an alternative calculation of the value separating what relates to the importation from what does not), carries more weight at this stage than any later appeal, where a regional director and then a court will have to be persuaded to set aside a position the administration will meanwhile have formalised and defended. The appeal comes too late for that. The administration’s time limits are, moreover, suspended during this exchange: for customs duties, from the communication of the grounds until the end of the period given to the debtor (Art. 103(3)(b) of the Union Customs Code); for the other charges, until the observations of the person liable are received and at the latest until the thirty days have expired (Art. L. 311-9).
6. After the inspection: limitation period, right to make mistakes, formal position
The inspected company wants to know how far back the administration can go. The answer again depends on the nature of the debt. For customs duties, the Union Customs Code sets the notification period at three years from the date on which the debt was incurred (Art. 103(1)); the national Code extends that period to five years where the debt results from an act that could give rise to criminal proceedings (Art. L. 322-2, formerly Art. 354 bis), and notification of an official report interrupts it up to the tenth year. For the other charges collected by customs, the right of recovery may be exercised for three years from the chargeable event, and notification of an official report interrupts it (Art. L. 322-1, formerly Art. 354).
The right to make mistakes exists in customs matters, but it has a blind spot that many managing directors are unaware of. Article L. 313-1 (formerly Art. 440-1) allows the person liable to correct, spontaneously or at the administration’s request, an error made for the first time in a declaration lodged on time during the previous three years. The text expressly excludes, however, the European Union’s own resources, that is to say customs duties themselves. It applies to excise duties and national taxes collected by customs, not to the Common Customs Tariff.
That leaves legal certainty for the future. Where the administration has knowingly taken a position on points examined during an inspection and communicated to the person liable, it can no longer call those points into question by arguing for a different interpretation (Art. L. 312-1 and L. 312-2, formerly Art. 345 bis). This is a further reason to ask, at the end of an inspection that went well, for the administration to state in writing what it checked and found compliant: Article L. 311-3 in fact requires it to do so where the adversarial exchange covers points examined without error.
Finally, a position we defend without reservation. A customs inspection is not the time to persuade; it is the time to lose nothing. The substantive discussion comes afterwards, within the thirty days, in writing, with the texts.
The firm acts as soon as an inspection is announced, on site if necessary, then in preparing observations and in discussions with the investigation services. Hervé Guyader is co-author of the Guide Lamy des procédures douanières, currently being updated following the recodification of 1 May 2026. For an overview of all our work, see our page customs lawyer in Paris; for a current matter, contact the firm, with a reply within 24 business hours. The guide to the 2026 European customs reform also describes what changes with the new Union Customs Code.
If the matter turns into a reassessment, see our page on challenging a French customs reassessment.
This analysis is part of the firm’s work in international trade law.
Frequently asked questions
Can I refuse to hand over a document to customs officers?
Not without risk. Refusal to disclose and any conduct obstructing disclosure are punishable by a fine of 3,700 euros, incurred as many times as there are requests left without a complete answer (Art. R. 515-2 of the Customs Code), and the court may order production subject to a penalty payment of up to 150 euros per day (Art. R. 515-3). Correspondence with your lawyer, covered by professional secrecy, need not be handed over. You may, on the other hand, state in writing that a document does not exist in the form requested.
Can officers enter my company without warning?
Yes, to search for offences, but within a precise framework. Article L. 423-1 of the Customs Code gives them access to premises used for business purposes, warehouses and business means of transport, between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. or during business hours. The public prosecutor must be informed before the operation and may object to it; a copy of the official report is sent to you within five days (Art. L. 423-3). Areas used for private purposes may be entered only with your written consent.
Must I answer questions during a customs interview?
No. If you are suspected of an offence, you must be informed of your right to remain silent, to leave the premises and, where the offence is punishable by imprisonment, to be assisted by a lawyer (Art. L. 433-1 of the Customs Code, referring to Art. 61-1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure). Silence cannot be held against you. It is better to announce a written, verified answer than to improvise an oral answer that will be recorded and deemed accurate until proven otherwise.
How long do I have to respond after an inspection?
In principle thirty days from the communication of the grounds for the proposed assessment, whether the exchange falls under Article 22(6) of the Union Customs Code (import and export duties) or under Articles L. 311-3 to L. 311-8 of the Customs Code (other charges). This period is used to submit observations and to request access to the documents on which the administration relies; the Cour de cassation considers that this right must be exercised by the person liable (Cass. com., 17 June 2026, no. 25-10.751).
Until when can customs claim duties?
For customs duties, three years from the date on which the debt was incurred (Art. 103 of the Union Customs Code), extended to five years where the debt results from an act that could give rise to criminal proceedings (Art. L. 322-2 of the Customs Code). For the other charges collected by customs, three years from the chargeable event (Art. L. 322-1). Notification of an official report interrupts these periods, which explains why the administration often draws one up before they expire.
For more on the substance, our analyses also cover costly mistakes on origin, challenging a notice of assessment and the 2026 European customs reform.
See also, on the neighbouring stages: responding to the adversarial exchange within thirty days; limitation of the customs debt; liability of the customs representative.
On the same litigation path, regarding the official report and its nullities: Official customs report: how to challenge it and which remedies to pursue; regarding penalties and settlement: Customs fines: challenge them in court or settle with the administration; regarding detained goods: Goods seized by customs: how to obtain release.
References: Customs Code, Art. L. 311-1 to L. 311-9, L. 312-1, L. 312-2, L. 313-1, L. 322-1, L. 322-2, L. 421-1, L. 422-1, L. 423-1 to L. 423-4, L. 423-6, L. 433-1, L. 433-2, L. 443-3, L. 443-7, L. 444-1, R. 515-2, R. 515-3, in force since 1 May 2026 (Ordinance No. 2026-265 and Decree No. 2026-266 of 8 April 2026); Union Customs Code (Regulation (EU) No 952/2013) of 9 October 2013, Art. 22(6), Art. 71(1)(c), Art. 103, applicable until Regulation (EU) 2026/2108 becomes applicable on 21 September 2027; Delegated Regulation (EU) 2015/2446, Art. 8; Code of Criminal Procedure, Art. 61-1; Law No. 71-1130 of 31 December 1971, Art. 66-5; Constitutional Council, Decision No. 2022-1010 QPC of 22 September 2022; Cass. com., 17 June 2026, no. 25-10.751, published in the Bulletin; Doctrine: Guide Lamy des procédures douanières, co-authored by Hervé Guyader.