When do I have to report an accident involving my product?

Report accidents via Safety Business Gateway

You report an accident involving a product via Safety Business Gateway, the central European notification point for product safety. This obligation rests with the manufacturer of the product — and that is not only the party that made the product. Whoever places a product on the market under their own name or brand is themselves considered a manufacturer, even if the product was purchased from an external party and only a logo was added to it. That party bears the notification obligation just as much as the original producer.

A distributor — a party that resells a product of another brand without modifying it — typically does not bear this notification obligation. The regulation directs the obligation to notify to the manufacturer, and as long as that role lies with another party, the obligation to notify itself via Safety Business Gateway does not automatically shift to the distributor. The fact that the notification is centrally processed through one European point of entry also means that the supervisory authority of each country — the NVWA in the Netherlands, the member state authorities coordinated by the BAuA in Germany, the FOD Economy – Economic Inspection in Belgium — receives the notification through that one system, not through a separate national contact point.

Article 20 of the regulation governs the notification obligation

This notification obligation in case of accidents is laid down in Article 20 of Regulation (EU) 2023/988, and because it is a regulation the text applies directly and identically in all twenty-seven member states; there is no national transposition that differs from country to country. Safety Business Gateway of the European Commission is the practical contact point through which this notification takes place, for the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium in the same way.