On 20 July, the European Commission published its own case for scrapping physical customs checks — a 384-times gap between its best- and worst-performing member state matters more than the 60% failure headline

What actually happened on 20 July

The European Commission's Taxation and Customs Union department published a report reviewing the performance of EU customs and market surveillance authorities throughout 2025, as e-commerce imports from outside the EU continued to surge. Two intensified control campaigns, run jointly by all 27 national customs authorities and 108 market surveillance authorities — phase one from April to June 2025, phase two from October to December 2025 — targeted flagged high-risk categories: toys, small electronics, cosmetics, personal protective equipment and food supplements. Over 60% of the products checked in those campaigns failed to meet EU product-compliance and safety requirements, for reasons the report attributes to missing labels, forbidden ingredients or absent safety documentation. Set against that is the report's routine-enforcement picture for all of 2025: only 65 items per million imported were physically checked, and fewer than 10 items per million were ultimately refused entry for non-compliance or serious risk — against a backdrop of roughly 6 billion items released for free circulation in 2025, three times the 2022 volume, with e-commerce parcels now accounting for over 97% of all shipments entering the EU. The report also found the odds of being caught depend heavily on where a shipment enters: the best-performing member state recorded a discovery rate 384 times higher than the worst-performing one.

The numbers behind the report

One set of numbers describes what customs finds when it goes looking. Another describes how much looking it's actually doing, and how unevenly. The gap between them is what the 20 July report is really about.

The real subject: EU customs is moving from sampling parcels to screening product data

For as long as e-commerce import volumes were manageable, physical spot-checks — a customs officer opening a parcel, a market-surveillance inspector testing a sample — could plausibly stand in for systematic enforcement. The 20 July report is the Commission's own admission that this model no longer scales: roughly 6 billion items entered the EU in 2025, e-commerce parcels made up over 97% of all shipments, and the physical check rate fell to 65 per million. What replaces sampling, according to the reform the Council and Parliament already agreed in March 2026, is enforcement built on data submitted at the point of declaration: a centralised EU Customs Data Hub, gradually replacing today's patchwork of national import systems, feeding a new EU Customs Authority headquartered in Lille that coordinates risk-scoring across all 27 member states instead of leaving it to whichever port a shipment happens to clear. Read the 20 July report as 'a lot of banned stuff is getting through' and the response looks like more inspectors. Read it as 'the EU is documenting exactly why spot-checks can't scale, right before switching to a data-driven system,' and the report becomes a preview: once the Data Hub is live, a shipment's declared, classified product data — composition, labelling content, applicable safety documentation, tariff classification — is the thing that determines whether it clears, not which of the EU's 27 ports it happened to enter through.

Why it matters for brands

Retail, consumer-goods and luxury brands selling into the EU — directly or through marketplaces, and especially through low-value, direct-to-consumer parcels — should not read today's thin enforcement odds as a safe harbour. The 20 July report explicitly frames those odds (65 checks and fewer than 10 refusals per million imported, a 384-times gap between member states) as the problem the EU customs reform exists to fix, not a stable status quo to plan around. Brands that already manage product compliance as structured, SKU-level data — composition, labelling content, certifications, correct customs classification — are the ones positioned to clear a data-driven checkpoint the moment the EU Customs Data Hub goes live, because their compliance case doesn't depend on a physical inspector never opening the right box. Brands that treat compliance documentation as scattered PDFs assembled after the fact, market by market, are the ones the reform is aimed at: the report's own numbers show that model has been surviving on enforcement thinness, not on the underlying accuracy of the data, and that's precisely the gap the Commission just told the world it's closing.

Two ways to read the 20 July report