A European rule is not a fixed given that works out the same everywhere. Most European regulation is transposed into national law, and that transposition differs per country: different thresholds, different deadlines, different supervisors, sometimes different scope. A company that operates in several countries can therefore face different versions of what is essentially the same obligation. Anyone who looks only at the European text and assumes it is applied the same way everywhere misses precisely the point where the national version deviates.
That makes the country, or the combination of countries, in which you operate a factor that helps determine which rules apply and what they look like. Not as an addition to the other factors, but as something that works through the other factors: the same sector, the same size and the same legal form can produce a different obligation in one country than in another.
Three types of change occur frequently.
The company expands into a new country. There, a different transposition of the same rule may apply, with a different threshold or a different moment at which the obligation takes effect. What did not yet apply elsewhere can apply there immediately.
The activities in a country change in nature, for example from a sales office to a branch with its own production or its own staff. That often changes not only the scale of the presence, but also which national rules apply to that presence.
The company withdraws from a country. An obligation that was tied to that presence may then lapse, but this is not automatic: some obligations continue to apply over a period, even after the activity has stopped.
In each of these situations, the question is not only whether a new rule is added, but also whether an existing obligation changes ownership, changes form of evidence, or simply continues to apply under a different name.
The precise thresholds, deadlines and exceptions per country change, and the transposition of European rules into national law is updated. A concrete threshold amount or a concrete deadline for a specific country cannot therefore be given here; that information belongs in the current national legal text or with the national supervisor, not in a text that is not maintained separately for every country. What does hold true is the principle: country is a factor that can shift the outcome of the other factors, and someone must be able to trace that shift at the moment the question arises.
If the country in which you operate changes, not only the list of obligations may change, but also who within the organization carries which obligation, what evidence belongs to it and which control applies to it. An obligation that in one country rested with the local entity may in another country come to rest with the group, or the other way round. Without a recorded overview of which countries counted at which moment, it is difficult to reconstruct afterwards why a particular obligation did or did not apply, and who was responsible for it.
That is why country choice is one of the factors that has been recorded, in the same way as how you record your sector so that it still holds up afterwards, how you record your size so that it still holds up afterwards and how you record your legal form so that it still holds up afterwards. For country specifically there is a dedicated page on how you record the countries in which you operate so that it still holds up afterwards, and for anyone wondering what exactly counts as evidence for an obligation tied to a country, there is an explanation of what counts as evidence for an obligation.
The Compliance Check takes the countries in which you operate as one of the fixed factors alongside sector, size, legal form and product. For every combination of factors, a list of obligations follows, with for each obligation an owner, the corresponding evidence and a control. This way, a board can show at any moment why a particular obligation did or did not apply to a particular country, and who was responsible for it at the time. The tool itself is under construction; anyone who wants to work with it can sign up for the waiting list.
Keeping track of obligations per country, revising ownership upon expansion or withdrawal and gathering the right evidence is work that repeats itself as soon as the list of countries changes. For anyone who wants to know which part of that recurring work can be taken over by AI and which part remains human work, the work scan from FTE TO AI calculates this per task.
Vraag maar welke verplichting op u van toepassing is, en waaraan u dat kunt aantonen.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.