Cross Border B2B Compliance Agent · for the UK or EU business about to sign across the border

See the duties on both sides of your cross border deal in a single working session, without paying two law firms to find them.

Describe the deal in plain words, the way you would write it to a colleague. A structured interview turns what you wrote into a Deal Passport. Deterministic screening of that passport against a verified rules table of 362 rules produces a Deal Compliance Brief for your side, and a second brief covering the counterparty's side. The corridor is GB and all 27 EU member states. Every obligation names the instrument it comes from and the article inside it.

A German company that buys your machines and resells them under its own invoices is a distributor. One that negotiates in your name is a commercial agent. Council Directive 86/653/EEC Article 1(2) draws the line there, and the consequence arrives at the end of the relationship: under Article 17 a commercial agent is indemnified or compensated when the appointment ends, with the indemnity capped at one year of average remuneration. The interview settles which of the two you are appointing before any screening runs, because that answer decides whether the agency law reaches you at all.

Duties in a cross border deal are timed to events, and most of them are cheap before the event and expensive after it. Four examples follow, and every one of them is a row in the table this agent screens against.

• Export evidence. A zero-rated export stays zero-rated where valid evidence of export is obtained within three months of the time of supply and kept for six years. Where the evidence is late or missing, the supply is not zero-rated and the VAT is yours. Value Added Tax Act 1994 s.30(6); VAT Regulations 1995 regulation 129; VAT Notice 703 paragraph 3.5.
• The origin statement. The zero tariff between the UK and the EU reaches originating goods only, and the claim rests on a statement on origin made out by the exporter or on the importer's knowledge. Without a valid claim, full third-country duty applies. EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement Articles 54, 56 and 58.
• The posting declaration. Send one engineer to Germany for a week of training and the employer with a seat abroad files a written declaration, in German, with the customs administration before the work begins. Failing to file, or filing late or incompletely, is an administrative offence carrying a ceiling of EUR 30,000. AEntG § 18 Abs. 1 Satz 1, § 23 Abs. 1 Nr. 7 and Abs. 3; MiLoG § 16 and § 21; MiLoMeldV § 1.
• The EU representative. Where a UK party offers goods or services to people in the Union, or monitors them, and holds no establishment in the Union, it designates a representative in the Union in writing. Regulation (EU) 2016/679 Articles 3(2) and 27(1).

Every one of those sits inside an ordinary distribution agreement.

They get missed because no single adviser holds both sides of the border, and because the compliance software industry sells to companies that already have compliance departments.

• 1. Paste the deal plan. Your own words, as you would write them to a colleague: who the parties are, what moves, who pays, who does what where. No forms, no legal vocabulary required.
• 2. Answer the interview. The agent decomposes the plan into the events that carry legal consequences: goods moving, goods placed on a market, services and digital supply, personal data crossing, payment, posted workers, distributor and agent appointments, licensing, and the rest of a closed list of fifteen. It reads each value back to you with the sentence in your plan that it came from, asks you to confirm the events that are NOT in the deal as well as those that are, and challenges any sentence in your plan it could not account for.
• 3. Read the brief. The Deal Compliance Brief groups the work into what happens before signature, what happens after signature, and what continues for the life of the deal. Every line carries its instrument and article. A counterfactual page records what your negative answers ruled out. A gaps page names, one by one, the questions the screening could not close.

The brief sorts every finding under five headings, so the deal reads as a task list rather than a statute list.

• Already in place. What your own answers showed is done, recorded so the file proves it.
• Before you sign. The registrations, appointments and written records that come first, each with its citation. Where a line is a decision rather than a task, the brief marks it as a decision, names it, and does not make it for you.
• After you sign. The rhythm of the deal itself: declarations, statements and documents per consignment or per supply.
• Ongoing. The keep-doing list: records kept, evidence held, registers maintained, with retention periods where the instrument sets them.
• We could not check. Every question the screening could not close, named one by one, with what answering it would change. Nothing is filled in from guesswork.

A matching brief exists for your counterparty: their duties, built from the same screening, restricted to the rows where they are the duty holder.

• The rules table. 362 rules. 59 of them apply across the UK and the EU, and 303 are national mechanics covering GB and all 27 EU member states. Each row carries its instrument, its article, the authority that receives or supervises it, the evidence it expects you to hold, its source link, and the date that source was last read.
• The register behind the house. 87 EU and UK instruments organised to obligation level, with 9,904 obligations catalogued. The free assessment on this site runs against the same register.
• The reference deal. A machine tool maker in Oxford appointing a distributor in Stuttgart: shipments, resale, payment, shared customer records, and two training visits a year. Its screening returns 29 obligation lines across the two parties, each carrying its instrument and article, one decision the system refuses to make for you, and three questions it could not close, stated as questions with what answering each would change.
• The publication. ComplianceSME's EU AI Act work has been covered in Solicitors Journal.

• You know what you owe and what the counterparty owes before signature, while both sets are still cheap to arrange.
• Your lawyer starts from a finished list. The hours you buy go on judgement.
• The counterparty holds their own duties in writing, so the deal does not fail on their side of the border.
• Every line carries its instrument and article, so the file stands up when somebody asks where the duty came from.
• What the screening could not answer is written down as a question, with what answering it would change, so you can see the edge of what you know.

The agent screens against a fixed table of rules. Each rule is keyed to an event, to the role a party holds in that event, and to the two countries involved, and each carries its instrument, its article, the authority that receives or supervises it, and the evidence it expects you to hold. A line in your brief reads as an obligation, a citation and a deadline position, for example a written designation under Article 27(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation before signature, or an economic operator registration before the first shipment.

Two rules govern what may appear. No obligation reaches your brief unless it is a row in that table. Where an event in your deal has no row, the brief prints a named coverage gap and tells you what is missing, rather than filling the space from a model's memory.

• Your brief covers your side. A separate Counterparty Brief covers theirs, built from the same screening, restricted to the rows where they are the duty holder.
• You decide, fact by fact, what the counterparty brief carries. Each shared fact is put to you as SHARE or WITHHOLD. Your size, your sector detail and your establishment answers are excluded from it by construction.
• Anything you withhold is marked in their copy as withheld. It is never dropped in silence.
• Nothing is disclosed until you give the disclosure word. The customer decides to disclose, not the system.

This is not legal advice. It carries no opinion, no liability cover, and it does not replace counsel. What it produces is the discovery layer: which obligations, filings, authorities and sequencing apply to each side of your deal, written down and cited. The correct next step for a deal that needs judgement is to take the brief into a lawyer, who then starts from a finished list rather than from your plan.

• Where the deal turns on a judgement, the brief marks the line as a decision required and names the decision, rather than making it.
• Three kinds of deal are refused by design: acquiring shares, assets or control of a business; equity, loan or capital investment; and transfers of controlled or dual-use technology. The agent explains the refusal and stops. Those deals need counsel from the first hour.
• Governing law and forum are outside the screening and are named as such on the cover of every brief.
• Where a country or an event sits outside the built table, the agent fails closed. It reports the gap and stops. It does not guess.

The alternative for an SME that wants both sides of a cross border deal written down is to engage one firm in each country and pay each of them to derive the list from first principles. Our own rate research of 30 August 2026, using published hourly rates in the corridor countries, the hours a two-firm discovery pass takes, and an allowance for the work of briefing two firms separately and reconciling two answers, puts that route here. The figures cover discovery only. Negotiation and drafting hours are excluded so that the comparison stays fair, and every bracket is stated conservatively.

Where this case is weakest, said plainly: a business that would never have engaged two firms saves nothing against money it was never going to spend. What that business gains is that the duties on both sides are written down, cited and sequenced before signature, instead of surfacing at the border.

Ask a general AI whether it can screen your cross border deal and it will tell you it can. Models are built to agree with you. It cannot, in one sitting or a thousand, because the capability does not live in the model: it lives in the machine engineering around it, the closed event vocabulary, the verified rules table, the citation discipline and the current text of the law.

A general model also answers from its training data, and regulation moves faster than training data. An agentic system improvises around the gaps and answers with confidence either way, and you cannot tell which of its answers are current. That is how a business ends up documented against a version of the law that no longer exists.

The ComplianceSME system is built so that cannot happen. Agentic behaviour is engineered out: the AI works inside structured files that hold the accurate, current rules, it follows the interview, and every finding is produced with article citations you can verify against the law itself. No obligation reaches your brief unless it is a row in the verified rules table, and where the table is silent the brief says so instead of guessing.

The gap between what you think AI can achieve, what AI will say it can achieve, and what it can really achieve is huge. That gap is the first thing every toolkit teaches, and this agent is built on the same doctrine: the model obeys the files, and the files carry the law.

The rules table behind the agent is built from primary sources through a documented build method, and the screening logic is verified against fixed reference deals with known correct outputs. On 31 August 2026 the complete system ran a reference deal end to end on the production runtime, from plain-words plan to finished brief, and reproduced the verified expected screening. ComplianceSME's EU AI Act work has been covered in Solicitors Journal. The register, the catalogue and every price are public on this site: no demo call, no quote form, no pipeline.

The agent runs on Claude Opus 4.6, the single model licensed to run ComplianceSME systems, for the reason set out in Why these systems run on Claude Opus 4.6. Obedience to a written procedure is the property this work depends on: a screening that reworded its own rules, or answered from memory when the table was silent, would be worth nothing on the day it was read back.

£750 per deal screening.

One screening covers one deal, and inside that price sit three things that would otherwise be commissioned as separate pieces of work.

• Your brief. The full obligation schedule for your side, sorted into the five headings, every line cited to its instrument and article, with the counterfactual and gaps pages behind it.
• The counterparty brief. Their side, built from the same screening, released on your word and carrying only the facts you chose to share.
• Re-runs on corrected facts. Correct a fact and the brief reprints on the same deal reference, included for 90 days from first issue.

Membership at £500 per month includes 3 deal screenings; after them, members pay £525 per screening, 30 per cent off the standalone price. Members use their included screenings from the account page.

Most of the pre-signature list cannot be back-dated. The written designation of an EU representative, the statement on origin behind the first zero-tariff claim, the posting declaration filed before the engineer travels: each of those is a document that has to exist before the thing it covers happens. After signature they are still obtainable, and they are then obtained while the deal is already running and the counterparty is already waiting on them.

The rules table carries its own date, and every row carries the date its source was last read, so you can see how current the reading is that your deal was screened against.

• Step 1. Buy the screening and download it. It runs in your own Claude account.
• Step 2. Describe the deal in plain words, the way you would write it to a colleague.
• Step 3. Answer the interview. Each value is read back to you with the sentence in your plan that it came from.
• Step 4. Read your brief, and release the counterparty brief when you decide to.

PS: each of the four examples earlier on this page is an ordinary line in an ordinary deal. Export evidence obtained late costs the zero rating on that supply. A missing statement on origin costs the zero tariff and puts full third-country duty on the goods. A posting declaration not filed before the work begins is an administrative offence with a ceiling of EUR 30,000. Treating a commercial agent as a distributor leaves the Article 17 indemnity, capped at one year of average remuneration, out of the contract that was meant to price it. One screening covers both sides of the deal and costs £750, against a two-firm discovery route that starts at £1,800.