ECHA Will Charge a Fee if You Said You Were an SME (REACH Rhymes)

The European Chemical Agency (ECHA) has issued a notice that it will charge an administrative fee to those companies who wrongly claimed to be a small or medium sized enterprise (SME). Apparently quite a few companies have claimed that they were smaller than they actually are, either through misunderstanding of how to calculate their size or through an attempt to benefit from reduced registration fees for smaller entities.  According to ECHA:

"As from 1 December 2010, ECHA will collect an administrative charge from registrants who wrongly claimed to be entitled to a fee reduction or a fee waiver. If ECHA concludes that the size of a company is larger than registered under REACH, the company will not only have to pay the difference in registration fee but also an administrative charge as follows (all values in Euros):"

Size of company	Administrative charges
Large (non-SME)	20 700
Medium	14 500
Small	8 300
Micro (*)	2 070

(*) Refers to fee waivers only

Also according to ECHA, with only a few days left to the November 30th registration deadline, over 16,000 registration dossiers have been received.  This is less than ECHA anticipated, which means either there will be a large proportion registering at the last minute or a lot of chemicals will not meet the statutory deadline.  The latter means that companies would not be able to continue production until they submit and pass all the completeness checks for their dossiers.