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EU Late Payment Directive - as useless as a fish on a bicycle

Next month it will be four years since the EU Directive on Late Payment (2011/7/ EU) was fully implemented across all 28 EU countries and also in Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein report InformitaNews. They go on to explain that, sadly it has made little impact - and comment that, “Largely it has proved to be as useless as a fish on a bicycle.” Although there has been some success with French government forcing big business in France to comply. But even then, “many medium or small French businesses remain blissfully ignorant of the legislation.”

It goes on to describe the situation in:

  • Southern Europe - largely ignored
  • Scandinavia - late payment not a problem
  • Germany - illegal behaviour 

Informita concludes that , “if you are a victim of late payment or very long payment terms you may need to suffer in silence before the next crop of bunglers decide to waste more time on the subject.”

TermsCheck

Informita’s TermsCheck provides a source of benchmark data for companies who want to directly compare supplier and customer terms with other real data points. The data is made up of data points from real companies, also no data point is more than 4 years old. The database continues to grow and has data from 184 countries. In addition, TermCheck analysis has now been fully incorporated with all payables and receivables analyses conducted by Informita. Recently a client used the data to negotiate 60 day payment terms (from 30 days) with their top suppliers.


CTMfile take: Late payment is a Trump like cancer that destroys, yet no-one, no authority seems concerned.

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