Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 612/2013 of 25 June 2013 on the operation of the register of economic operators and tax warehouses, related statistics and reporting pursuant to Council Regulation (EU) No 389/2012 on administrative cooperation in the field of excise duties

1 The structure and the content of messages relating to the registration of economic operators and tax warehouses in the national registers and in the Central Register shall comply with Annex I. Those messages shall be exchanged by means of the computerised system.

2 The messages referred to in paragraph 1 shall be exchanged for the following purposes: (a) notification of modifications of national registers sent by the central excise liaison offices and the liaison departments to the Central Register; (b) notification of modifications of the Central Register sent to national registers; (c) requests made by central excise liaison offices and the liaison departments for details of modifications to the Central Register; (d) requests made by central excise liaison offices and the liaison departments for statistical information extracted from the Central Register; (e) forwarding by the Commission to the requesting Member States of statistical information extracted from the Central Register.

3 Where codes are required for the completion of certain data fields in the messages referred to in paragraph 1, the codes listed in Annex II to this Regulation or in Annex II to Regulation (EC) No 684/2009 shall be used.

For the purposes of this Regulation, the following definitions apply: (1) ‘record’ means an entry in a national register or the Central Register referred to in Article 19(4) of Regulation (EU) No 389/2012; (2) ‘modification’ means the creation, update or invalidation of a record; (3) ‘activation date’ means the date in a record set by the responsible Member State, from which date the record is available for use in electronic verification in all Member States and from which the extracted details thereof are available for consultation for economic operators.

1 Each central excise liaison office or liaison department designated in accordance with Article 4 of Regulation (EU) No 389/2012 shall be responsible for the forwarding of modifications of its national register to the Central Register and for applying modifications to its national register that have been sent from the Central Register or that have been retrieved from the Central Register or both.

2 The Commission shall establish and maintain a list of the responsible central excise liaison offices or liaison departments on the basis of information provided by the Member States and shall make that list available to Member States.

3 Each central excise liaison office or liaison department shall forward notifications of any modifications of its national register to the Central Register at the latest on the activation date of the modification. The message to be used for modifications of national registers shall be the ‘Operations on the register of economic operators’ message set out in Table 2 of Annex I.

1 When receiving an ‘Operations on the register of economic operators’ message from a central excise liaison office or liaison department containing a notification of a modification to a national register the Commission shall verify that the structure and content of the message comply with Table 2 of Annex I.

2 Where the structure and content of the message referred to in paragraph 1 comply with Table 2 of Annex I, the following actions shall be carried out: (a) the Commission shall register the modification in the Central Register without delay; (b) a notification shall be sent to each Member State of which the central excise liaison office or liaison department is registered to receive notifications of modifications using the ‘Operations on the register of economic operators’ message set out in Table 2 of Annex I.

3 Where the structure or content of the ‘Operations on the register of economic operators’ message referred to in paragraph 1 does not comply with Table 2 of Annex I the Commission shall return the notification to the central excise liaison office or liaison department that forwarded the notification using the ‘Refusal of update of economic operators’ message set out in Table 3 of Annex I, with a reason code specifying the reason for the refusal.

4 Upon receipt of a ‘Refusal of update of economic operators’ message the central excise liaison office or liaison department shall carry out any necessary corrective action without delay and resubmit the notification.

5 The central excise liaison office or liaison department of each Member State that is not registered to receive notifications of modifications from the Commission shall request an extract of the modifications applied to the Central Register at least twice a day using the ‘Common request’ message set out in Table 1 of Annex I.

1 At least twice a day the central excise liaison office or liaison department of each Member State shall incorporate modifications that have been received from the Central Register into its national register.

2 The modifications referred to in paragraph 1 shall be available for consultation by the central excise liaison office or liaison department as soon as they have been incorporated into the national register and shall be available for use in electronic verification from the activation date of the modification.

1 At least twice a day the Commission shall prepare an extract from the Central Register of all active records. In preparing that extract the Commission shall remove any record that is not available for public consultation. The Commission shall also remove from any remaining record all details for each type of economic operator or premises thereof that do not correspond to the descriptions of extracted details of entries laid down in points (a), (b) and (c) of paragraph 3.

2 Economic operators may request the Commission for extracted details of a record by submitting the unique excise number referred to in point (a) of Article 19(2) of Regulation (EU) No 389/2012.

3 Where the unique excise number submitted corresponds to an excise number present in the extract of the Central Register the extracted details of the register shall be returned to the economic operator, who has made the request, in the following situations: (a) if the unique excise number submitted corresponds to a record for an authorised warehouse keeper, a registered consignee or a registered consignor the extract shall contain any of the following: (i) the textual description of the operator type code (data group 2 e set out in Table 2 of Annex I); (ii) at least one excise product category code (data group 2.4 a in the ‘Operations on the register of economic operators’ message) or at least one excise product code (data group 2.5 a set out in Table 2 of Annex I); (iii) a combination of data groups 2.4 a and 2.5 a that is in conformance with the rules contained in the description set out in Table 2 of Annex I; (b) if the unique excise number submitted corresponds to a record for a tax warehouse the extract shall indicate any of the following: (i) at least one excise product category code (data group 3.4 a set out in Table 2 of Annex I); (ii) at least one excise product code (data group 3.5 a set out in Table 2 of Annex I); (iii) a combination of data groups 3.4 a and 3.5 a that is in conformance with the rules contained in the description set out in Table 2 of Annex I; (c) if the unique excise number submitted corresponds to a registered consignee that falls under point (h) of Article 19(2) of Regulation (EU) No 389/2012 the extract shall in addition to the data provided in point (a) contain the following information: (i) the expiry date of the authorisation (data group 4 c set out in Table 2 of Annex I); (ii) whether the authorisation may be used for more than one movement (data group 4 d in Table 2 of Annex I); (iii) at least one set of temporary authorisation details (data group 4.3 set out in Table 2 of Annex I).

4 Where there is no correspondence between the unique excise number submitted and the extract of the Central Register the economic operator, who has made the request, shall be informed.

5 If an economic operator claims that a record relating to his authorisation is missing or is incorrect the Commission shall on request inform him on how to make a request for a correction of the record and provide the contact details of the central excise liaison office or liaison department of the responsible Member State.

1 The statistical information to be extracted by the Commission from the Central Register in accordance with Article 34(5) of Regulation (EU) No 389/2012 shall be the following: (a) the number of active and inactive economic operators records; (b) the number of pending expirations of authorisations, being the total number of authorisations that will expire in the following month or in the following quarter; (c) the types of economic operators, the number of economic operators, by type, and the number of tax warehouses; (d) the number of authorised economic operators by product and by product category; (e) the number of modifications to excise authorisations. On the basis of the statistical information referred to in the first subparagraph the Commission shall prepare a monthly report for the Member States.

2 Any central excise liaison office or liaison department may request the Commission to prepare a specific statistical report on the central register. That request shall be made using the ‘Common request’ message set out in Table 1 of Annex I. The Commission shall reply by using the ‘SEED statistics’ message set out in Table 4 of Annex I.

1 Within two hours of receipt of a notification of a modification of a national register the Commission shall process that modification in accordance with Article 4.

2 Within two hours of receipt of a ‘Common Request’ message set out in Table 1 of Annex I, the Commission shall provide the requested information to the requesting central excise liaison office or liaison department.

The Central Register and the national registers shall be available at all times.

The service obligations of the Commission and the Member States laid down in Articles 8 and 9 do not apply under the following duly justified circumstances: (a) the Central Register or a national register is unavailable due to hardware or telecommunication failures; (b) network problems occurs which are not under the direct control of the Commission or the Member State concerned; (c) force majeure; (d) scheduled maintenance notified at least forty-eight hours before the planned start of the maintenance period.

This Regulation shall enter into force on the twentieth day following that of its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union. Articles 8, 9 and 10 shall apply from 1 January 2015.