Attachment of Debts and Inaccurate Statement of Account: Nullity Requires a Total Absence, Not a Mere Calculation Error – Cass. 2e civ., 26 March 2026, No. 23-18.348

French Supreme Court, Second Civil Chamber, 26 March 2026, No. 23-18.348: Partial quashing of the judgment of the Orléans Court of Appeal of 10 May 2023, No. 22/02298

What Was the Background to the Dispute?

Attachments to Recover Unpaid Wages

It all starts with a hard-won court decision: a Court of Appeal judgment delivered on 26 October 2021 orders a cleaning company, Limpa nettoyages, to pay one of its former employees various salary-related and compensatory sums. These sums include in particular back pay for the years 2014, 2015 and 2016, as well as the compensatory indemnities provided for by Article L. 1226-14 of the Labour Code (Code du travail), which concerns employees found unfit for work whose contract has been terminated.

Armed with this enforceable title (titre exécutoire), the creditor employee wasted no time. Between December 2021 and January 2022, she had three attachments of debts levied: on 16 and 31 December 2021, then on 4 January 2022. These attachments were served on third parties, presumably banks, in order to freeze and recover the funds held by the debtor company.

The Court of Appeal Annuls Everything: A Contested Solution

Limpa nettoyages, a less than cooperative debtor, challenged the attachments before the Enforcement Judge in Orléans. It was partially successful on appeal: the Orléans Court of Appeal, in its judgment of 10 May 2023, declared the three attachments of debts null and ordered their release. Its reasoning can be summed up in a few lines: the statement of account provided by the creditor was allegedly not “accurate and verifiable”, because it included sums calculated on a gross basis, on which interest and ancillary amounts were then calculated. According to the Court of Appeal, salary awards are indeed made on a gross basis but are paid by the employer on a net basis, after deduction of employer contributions, employee contributions and withholding tax.

The Court of Appeal added, with notable severity, that the creditor, who had worked as an administrative and financial manager, could not plead ignorance of this rule. It concluded that this inaccuracy caused prejudice to the debtor by distorting the calculation of the ancillary amounts.

It is against this judgment that the creditor appealed on points of law, relying in particular on breach of Article R. 211-1, 3° of the Code of Civil Enforcement Procedures.

What Rules Apply to the Notice of Attachment of Debts?

Article R. 211-1 CPCE: What the Notice Must Contain, on Pain of Nullity

Article R. 211-1 of the Code of Civil Enforcement Procedures is the pivotal provision on attachments of debts. It sets out the mandatory particulars that the bailiff’s notice served on the third-party garnishee (tiers saisi) must contain, and specifies which of them are required “on pain of nullity”. Among these mandatory particulars, 3° requires a separate statement of the sums claimed: it must state separately the principal, the costs and the accrued interest, and include a provision for interest falling due within the one-month period allowed for lodging a challenge.

The structure of this article therefore clearly distinguishes two categories of particulars: those whose absence entails the nullity of the notice, and the others. This distinction, apparently purely technical, lies at the heart of the debate decided by the French Supreme Court in this judgment. It is not a procedural detail: it is a question of life or death for the entire attachment.

What Is a Statement of Account Within the Meaning of the Law?

The notion of a statement of account (décompte) is simpler than it appears. It is a table or detailed list, included in the notice of attachment, that breaks down the sums claimed by category: on one side the principal of the debt (what is owed under the enforceable title), on the other the costs incurred for the enforcement procedure, and finally the interest, both that already accrued at the date of the attachment, plus a provision covering the interest that will run during the one-month period in which the debtor may challenge the measure.

This statement performs an essential function of information and transparency: it allows the debtor to check that the sums claimed correspond to what is recorded in the enforceable title, and to understand how they were calculated. It also allows the debtor to assess, with full knowledge of the facts, whether it is worth challenging.

Why Does the French Supreme Court Quash the Judgment?

The Fundamental Distinction: Absence of a Statement vs Error in the Amount

The French Supreme Court’s reasoning is at once brief and decisive. It first recalls the applicable provision, Article R. 211-1, 3° CPCE, and then draws from it the following rule, formulated with remarkable clarity: only the absence of a statement of account can lead to nullity of the measure. An error in the sum claimed in the notice of attachment is not a ground of nullity. It can give rise only to a reduction of the amount for which the attachment is levied.

In other words, the French Supreme Court draws a sharp distinction between two situations that are radically different in terms of legal consequences:

This distinction is not new in the case law of the French Supreme Court, but it is applied here with particular firmness against a Court of Appeal that had tried to blur it. The Orléans Court of Appeal had held that the statement, although present, had to be not only formally in existence but also “accurate and verifiable”. By raising the required standard in this way, from mere presence to complete accuracy, it had turned a calculation error into a ground of nullity. The French Supreme Court sweeps this reasoning aside.

The Gross/Net Problem in Employment Matters: A Question of Basis, Not Nullity

The underlying question is nonetheless real and deserves attention: in employment law, salary awards are indeed made on a gross basis by the courts. But what the employee actually receives net is lower, since the employer must deduct employee contributions and apply withholding tax. The creditor had calculated her interest and ancillary amounts on the basis of the gross amounts shown in the judgment, without taking this deduction into account.

The Court of Appeal had seen in this error of basis a reason to annul the attachments, considering that the inaccuracy of the amount claimed as principal was liable to distort the calculation of interest. The French Supreme Court does not say that this error is without consequence: it simply says that the consequence cannot be nullity. The right sanction is the reduction of the amount attached to the level of what is actually owed. The attachment survives, but its basis is corrected.

What Is the Practical Scope of This Judgment for Creditors?

Reduction as the Only Possible Sanction

The central lesson of this judgment is of considerable practical importance for any creditor faced with a challenge based on the inaccuracy of its statement of account. Before this decision, or more precisely before this rule was clearly reaffirmed, there was a real risk of seeing an entire attachment annulled for a mere calculation error, forcing the creditor to start the whole procedure over from the beginning, with the delays and costs that entails.

The rule laid down by the French Supreme Court is at bottom a rule of proportionality: the sanction must be adapted to the degree of irregularity. The total absence of a statement deprives the debtor of any information about what is being claimed and justifies annulling the measure. By contrast, a calculation error deprives the debtor of no essential information: the debtor knows what is being claimed, and can check, challenge and have it corrected. The appropriate sanction is then reduction, not destruction of the attachment.

The Knock-On Effects of the Quashing

The judgment of 26 March 2026 does not merely quash the part of the operative provisions concerning the nullity of the attachments. By application of Article 624 of the Code of Civil Procedure (code de procédure civile), which provides for quashing by consequence of the parts that necessarily depend on it, the French Supreme Court carries with it in its quashing a whole series of decisions that stood only because the attachments had been annulled.

The parts of the operative provisions that had rejected the claims seeking correction of the net amount of the back pay, the issuing of compliant payslips for the years 2014, 2015 and 2016, and their electronic transmission to the social security bodies are thus quashed, as are those that ordered the creditor to bear the costs caused by the attachments or to pay sums to the debtor under Article 700 of the Code of Civil Procedure. The whole judicial edifice built on the annulment of the attachments collapses.

The only part of the appeal judgment that is preserved is the rejection of the claim for damages for abuse of process brought by Limpa nettoyages against the creditor. The French Supreme Court therefore upholds this rejection: the debtor cannot rely on an abuse of process by the creditor, even if the latter made a calculation error in her statement of account.

The case is referred back to the Bourges Court of Appeal to be re-judged on the points quashed, this time without being able to annul the attachments for a mere lack of accuracy in the statement of account.

How Can You Secure an Attachment of Debts in Practice?

This judgment, although favourable to creditors, calls for increased vigilance in preparing the notice of attachment. An error in the amount no longer leads to nullity, of course. But it can lead to a significant reduction in the sums recovered, and will inevitably be a source of litigation, delay and additional cost. Prudence is therefore called for.

For salary claims, the gross/net question is particularly delicate. Employment tribunal awards are expressed on a gross basis in the operative part of the decision, but the debtor employer must pay over the employee contributions to the social security bodies and apply withholding tax. The employee’s real claim in terms of direct payment is therefore lower than the gross amount shown in the judgment. To calculate correctly the statement of account for an attachment of debts in this context, one must apply to each year concerned the employee contribution rates in force, take into account the corresponding Social Security ceilings, and apply the withholding tax rate, which may be 0% in the absence of declared income, as seems to have been envisaged in the remand proceedings.

It should also be stressed that the argument based on the creditor’s profession (administrative and financial manager), used by the Court of Appeal to reject the plea of ignorance, was swept aside by the French Supreme Court. The creditor’s professional status is legally irrelevant in assessing the validity of a notice of attachment: the formal rules are the same for everyone. This reasoning of the Court of Appeal, which in effect added a subjective condition to a purely formal rule, could not withstand analysis.

Conclusion

The judgment delivered by the Second Civil Chamber of the French Supreme Court on 26 March 2026 forcefully recalls a rule that enforcement practice must never lose sight of: for attachments of debts, nullity for want of a statement of account is strictly limited to the case where the statement is entirely absent from the notice. An error in the amounts, even one based on a real confusion between gross and net, even one liable to affect the calculation of interest, can lead only to the attachment being reduced to the true measure of the debt, and not to its annulment.

This solution accords with the letter of the text and with a logic of proportionality that should guide the whole field of compulsory enforcement. It protects creditors against an abusive nullification of their rights, while preserving the debtor’s ability to obtain a correction of the amounts where they are exaggerated.

For practitioners and litigants facing difficulties in enforcing court decisions, this judgment is good news: an imprecision in the statement of account should not sound the death knell of a costly and laboriously constructed enforcement procedure. It remains the case that the best way to avoid this kind of litigation is still to prepare the notice of attachment carefully from the outset, and that is where the assistance of a lawyer specialising in enforcement law can make all the difference.

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