Over 60% of inspected French domiciliation companies show anomalies, says the Senate — a bill wants to require verification before every contract
A bill filed in the French Senate on 16 January 2026 (no. 270, 2025-2026), born from a senatorial inquiry into organized crime's grip on the economy, aims to overhaul how domiciliation companies are regulated. Its finding: DGCCRF inspections show that over 60% of establishments show anomalies — identifying company officers, verifying beneficial owners, internal procedures. Article 1 requires a "consistency analysis" (officer identity, declared activity, governance, risk profile) before any signature: the contract could no longer be concluded until it's complete.
The bill doesn't stop at Article 1. Article 2 creates an alert threshold on the number of companies domiciled at the same address, triggering enhanced review, plus a mandatory initial and ongoing AML/CFT training requirement. Article 3 introduces a digital registry accessible to authorities. Article 4 toughens sanctions, up to permanent withdrawal of the operating licence for serious or repeated breaches. The bill's explanatory statement says it plainly: the profession has "undertaken a genuine drive toward structure," but the text wants to give it "the tools needed to fully play its role as the first administrative line of defence against fraudulent schemes."
This is still a bill — not law, and its timeline for adoption remains uncertain. But the direction it sets matches what AppH's Pack Accueil already prepares on the agency side: a structured, timestamped file before every signature, the expected documents gathered right at the front desk, without the assistant ever standing in for the consistency analysis itself — which stays, as it does today, a human decision made by the domiciliation company.
For AppH
- The front-desk assistant can prepare the file ahead of signature (documents, declared activity, contact details) in the same spirit as the bill's Article 1: nothing gets signed until the expected information has been gathered.
- The timestamped, per-agency file already makes it practically easier to meet what a future digital registry (Article 3) might require — without waiting for the implementing decree planned under Article 5.
Against / the honest limit
- AppH doesn't perform the "consistency analysis" itself — the assistant gathers, the domiciliation company decides, exactly as the bill explicitly requires before signature.
- The bill hasn't been voted on; its alert thresholds and the digital registry's rules are still to be set by decree, so we're not assuming a final version.
What strikes us about this bill is that it formalizes in law the exact boundary we chose when designing Pack Accueil: prepare the file, never judge in the professional's place. If this bill passes, agencies that already have that discipline will have a head start, not a rush job to improvise.
Reviewed by a human at AppH