The European Commission has evaluated the EU's tobacco-control framework — the Tobacco Products Directive 2014/40/EU (TPD) and the Tobacco Advertising Directive 2003/33/EC — covering the years 2012–2025. The evaluation examines the rules' effectiveness, efficiency, relevance and coherence, and its findings are intended to inform the directive's revision. Our firm submitted its position in the public feedback procedure.

A central thread is the impact on illicit trade of the track & trace system, in force since May 2019. The Commission's Staff Working Document (SWD) finds that the pre-2019 rate of decline in illicit trade continued after the system's introduction, and concludes that it "likely contributed to the maintenance of the overall downward trend across the EU" (SWD, pp. 64 and 112).

Drawing on more than 17 years' experience and over 1,000 tobacco-crime criminal proceedings, and on the converging findings of CASE-Research (2024), the Warsaw Enterprise Institute (2025) and the Institute of Public Finance (2024), we raised the following objections:

• Correlation is not causation. If the decline began before 2019, it cannot be attributed to a system introduced later. In our view, its impact on Poland's shadow economy was very limited.
• The system does not reach most of the illicit market. Illicit trade rests on three sources: smuggling from outside the EU, non-domestic products from other Member States, and counterfeits. Track & trace assists only with the second; it does not reach smuggling or counterfeits, which simulate or omit the codes.
• The real causes of the decline lie elsewhere: the sealing of borders (the National Revenue Administration and the SENT system, 2017), stable excise policy in 2015–2019, and the closing of the eastern border following the pandemic, the Belarus crisis and the war in Ukraine — not the TPD.
• Illegal production is rising. Falling consumption coincided with growing detection of illegal factories, whose output is destined for higher-excise states (per KPMG, in 2023 mainly the United Kingdom, France and Germany). The system does not touch this sphere.
• The trend is reversing. The shadow-economy share rose from 3.6% (2023) to 4.3% (2024), reaching 6.7% in the fourth quarter of 2024 — in anticipation of announced excise increases. This confirms a direct link between sharp fiscal increases and the growth of the shadow economy, which track & trace does not offset.

We also stress the public-health dimension: counterfeits typically exceed the permitted limits on harmful substances, so pushing consumers into the shadow economy threatens not only the State budget but also public health — contrary to the directive's objectives. Effective policy to curb the illicit market requires an accurate diagnosis of its real causes.