It was in violation of the rules for charging fees when the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration (Fødevarestyrelsen) sent an invoice in October 2023 in connection with a control visit to an assembly center. During the visit, where everything else was found to be in order, the official veterinarian had to wait for two hours because the platform for reporting export animals, the Export Portal, was offline.
Nevertheless, the company received an invoice from the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration for the two hours of waiting time. According to the agency, the Export Portal is not a so-called internal matter that the agency must pay for.
Therefore, the assembly center, Sønderby Legal, took on the case, and in its complaint to the agency, we referred to five points of complaint of national and EU legal content. Described overall, a fee may only be charged for control and that waiting time is conceptually not control. That it is an EU legal condition for being able to charge a fee that a control is carried out in accordance with the purpose of the control.
In addition, Sønderby Legal referred to the fact that the waiting time was not due to the complainant’s circumstances on the site, that there was a lack of proportionality in relation to EU law, and that it is clearly an internal matter for the agency that the Export Portal is not working. The charging of the fee was quite simply unlawful.
It was an internal matter
But after the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration had initially rejected the complaint, the case went on to the Environmental and Food Appeals Board (Miljø- og Fødevareklagenævnet), which has now decided the case. And here the assembly center has been upheld.
Here, the board established that the Export Portal is precisely an internal matter and that a charge is therefore unlawful.
»In its decision, the Environmental and Food Appeals Board has based its decision on the fact that the Export Portal was not available at the time of the inspection. In this connection, the Board notes that, according to the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration’s internal guidelines, time is not invoiced when an employee from the agency has not been able to perform his or her work, if this is due to the agency’s internal circumstances«, writes the Environmental and Food Appeals Board in its decision.
The Board adds that it is assessed that the fact that the Export Portal has been unavailable is precisely due to the agency’s internal circumstances, including because it appears on the front page of the Export Portal that it is the agency’s own website.
The Board has also included an appendix from the complainant, which is a schedule of time registration codes from the agency, which shows that in connection with export at an assembly point, no invoice shall be issued if there are IT problems, it is stated further in the ruling.
The ruling was overturned
In this connection, the Board has emphasized that, according to the schedule, it is the agency’s practice to invoice if the IT problem is not characterized by the system being unavailable, but is merely slow, or if the work can otherwise be performed, e.g. manually.
»Against this background, the Board assesses that the unavailability of the Export Portal has meant that the veterinarian present has not had the opportunity to perform his work. It is also the Board’s assessment that this is due to an internal matter, which, pursuant to the agency’s internal guidelines, shall not be invoiced for«, concludes the Environmental and Food Appeals Board.
