Letter of formal notice.

When the Commission believes a member state has failed to apply EU law it sends a letter of formal notice, a written request for information that the state normally has two months to answer. If the reply does not satisfy, the next formal decision is a reasoned opinion, again with about two months, then referral to the Court of Justice; the Commission’s own description notes that most cases settle before reaching the court and that financial penalties are proposed when a country is referred a second time. The exception is the one that matters here: where a member state has not communicated the measures transposing a directive, the Commission can ask the court for penalties at the first referral. It matters to a compliance date because it is the first public signal that a national transposition is late or wrong. A shop can be perfectly aligned with the EU-level deadline and still be dealing with a member state whose register, éco-organisme or labelling rule does not exist yet. Tracking which states collect letters on a given directive forecasts when the national paperwork actually turns up better than the directive’s own deadline does.