01 Jun The advantages of online declaration
Since the publication of decree no. 2006-352 relating to dietary supplements in 2006, the DGCCRF has had to deal with over 57,000 applications. Office 4A is currently processing 600 to 650 dietary supplement marketing declarations a month.
But the current declaration system has a number of disadvantages: long examination times, inappropriate means, no document supplied to the operator, no opportunity to stop the procedure to seek extra information… The introduction of the online procedure will thus help to standardise the declaration formality, speed up application processing and in particular the certificate of compliance, on official headed paper, which is greatly sought-after by operators to help them promote their exports.
Madame de Vecchy, along with other members of the SYNADIET federation, was associated with the very early stages of the project to introduce the online procedure in order to bring her experience to the project and make comments.
This collaboration with the DGCCRF was an opportunity to take into account the realities of the situation from a practical point of view and in terms of the user-friendliness of the site by offering choices for improving the use of the tool. For example, the DGCCRF took on board SYNADIET’s comments concerning the problems encountered with FOODSUP (a Belgian online declaration module) in order to anticipate them during the construction of the French online declaration system. The introduction of the online declaration system has been virtually finalised and most of the comments sent in by SYNADIET built in.
The legal framework has not kept up with the speed of reaction of the IT aspects. The computer system is operational but the implementation texts authorising new doses of nutrients and finally legalising the substances authorised in France have not come out.
It’s important for most of the authorised ingredients to be in the online declaration tool’s drop-down menus to ensure that most of the declarations follow the procedure in accordance with article 15 of the dietary supplements decree. To remedy the situation, the DGCCRF is going to enter lists of ingredients in its declaration system database “Télé ICARE”; operators will then know, when they declare, the status of an ingredient and the type of procedure to follow.
This procedure is due to come into force in the second quarter of 2016, as stated in a Notice to operators concerning the transmission of dietary supplement marketing declarations prior to the implementation of the online procedure (JO of 09/01/2016). The notice sets out the transitional measures for the next few months …