EU customs clearance with fiscal representation facilitates tax-free intra-community shipping of your exports from Switzerland to the European Union. This has many advantages:
- puts you on the same footing as EU suppliers
- faster delivery thanks to immediate customs clearance
- improved liquidity when dealing with high-value goods
- no loss of interest through advance EUST (import sales tax) payments
- avoid high processing costs in other countries, while also reducing waiting times
- all reporting obligations to the German government are handled directly by the fiscal representative
DPD fiscal representation.
If you are sending parcels with DPD, we recommend you use our partner company, Petra Bertel, as your fiscal representative. To do this, you need to give Petra Bertel your power of attorney (individual or general power of attorney). If you would like to know more, our export specialists would be very happy to provide you with all the information you need.
When can’t you use fiscal representation?
According to § 22a of Germany’s Sales Tax Law, a foreign business can only be represented by a fiscal representative if it is only exporting tax-exempt items to Germany and if it doesn’t want to claim any German deductible input tax. If the Swiss supplier is registered for sales tax purposes in Germany, therefore, or if it is exporting e.g. goods or services under contract to Germany (which are taxable, but for which the recipient rather than the supplier has to pay the tax), fiscal representation cannot be used. In this case, the supplier itself must take care of declaration and logging obligations relating to EU customs clearance in Germany.
