Report of receipt

In EMCS the report of receipt is the message that closes the movement the e-AD opened. It has to be filed without delay and at the latest five working days after the end of the movement (Section 33(1) AlkStV). The main customs office can extend that deadline on request where it would otherwise cause undue hardship.

In practice the deadline is rarely the problem. It gets tight when discrepancies have to be settled, because that has to happen before the report goes out. Shortages and excess quantities belong in the report itself rather than in a correcting email afterwards, because the report documents the position that consignee, consignor and customs office will later rely on.

If the report never arrives, the consignor's guarantee stays tied up. EMCS sends the consignee a reminder message beforehand, which in practice often goes unnoticed.

The classic case is the quiet acceptance: 20 pallets arrive instead of 22, 22 are reported, and the rest is sorted out by phone. The report is then wrong and the missing quantity counts as having entered free circulation. The second case is the forgotten report after a redirection or a partial delivery, because nobody still knows which ARC is open.

A weekly review of open ARCs prevents both. It takes minutes and saves the correspondence that otherwise starts months later.