Öffentlicher Sektor wird wachsender Unternehmensschulden beschuldigt

"One out of four bankruptcies in Europe is due to late payments. Perfectly viable enterprises are being wiped out by the scourge of payment delays, and the average time from an invoice being issued until payment is received is on the rise in Europe," said Luc Hendrickx, director of enterprise policy at the European Association of Craft, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (UEAPME).

"The recently revised Late Payments Directive can help in limiting the damage inflicted by payment delays to private enterprises, especially to smaller companies," Hendrickx continued.

"However, this text will make no difference unless it is put into practice as soon as possible, ideally sooner than the implementation deadline foreseen by the text. That is why all the EU institutions together should strictly monitor the implementation as they have repeatedly promised."

He concluded: "Public authorities are the worst payer in Europe time-wise. With all the recent talk of economic stimulus and at a time when businesses are clearly struggling, governments could inject billions in their economies by simply paying private enterprises promptly. In fact, member states already promised to settle all payments to private companies within 30 days in their 2008 'Economic Recovery Plan'. This long overdue promise has now become law. We hope that it will now become common practice."

A senior Commission official said: "We are helping the member states to transpose the new directive before 16 March 2013. After that we will be linking up with the member states' chambers of commerce launching in 2012-2013. We are also going to launch our project with the European Parliament with a website on micro credit and the credit management of SMEs, highlighting how they can use those pre-existing mechanisms to deal with small and uncontested claims to obtain payment more quickly. There are a number of tools that need to be better communicated to the SMEs."

On the directive, the official added: "All the member states are backing this directive and now its up to them to complete a swift implementation of the initiatives. Although the directive contains the right for business-to-business contracts to be excluded from the late payment provisions where this is agreed by the parties, that does not mean that we do not care about payments in these contracts."

"After the implementation of the directive the Commission will be looking out for abusive clauses, such as where companies insist that payment need not be made for between 200 and 300 days. We will be keeping a close eye on such contract terms and will take action if necessary," the official said.

"Public sector companies have the means to make their payments on time but they are not doing so, and more companies could avoid going bankrupt and grow their businesses if the public sector improved its record," said Lars Wollung, CEO of Intrum Justitia.

Wollung added: "The most efficient thing that could be done is to shorten the lead time of debt payment across the continent and to increase the efficiency of recovery methods. In some countries debts are dealt with efficiently but in others they are put on to a 'to-do' list, or dealt with on a pile of unrelated issues, such as crimes, and left for up to one-and-a-half years before being attended to."

"German companies adjusted their books swiftly in reaction to the crisis and wrote off their debts last year, leading to relatively high debt figure there last year. As a result they have decreased the level of written off corporate debt from last year and are recovering well," added Wollung.

Implementing the Late Payments Directive is only one side of the solution, according to Wollung. He concluded: "The actual systems for enforcement of the directive must also be efficient. Simply having rules in place to ensure that the public sector will pay will not ensure that they do, there must be efficient means of backing this up."