90 days rule in EU
 

Hi, a friend has been travelling in southern Europe, Spain, Portugal, France, for a few months and have just become aware of the 90 days rule for UK citizens.
I'm not sure how much over this 90 days he is but it can't be more than a month, 12 days in total .
My question is, Is this rule strictly enforced?
Any suggestions to avoid paying this ridiculous tax?
Thanks

I'm not aware of a tax; if you mean the fine, then I suspect that you will be identified as overstaying when you leave, and given the nature of the discussions at "BREXIT" I doubt that your friend ... will be given any relaxation of the rule, which has been clearly publicised for a while. I suggest pleading ignorance and asking for forgiveness.

Yeah, time to suck it up and just pay a fine when it comes through

Your friend will hopefully be lucky.

The EU is planning to replace the current system of manually stamping passports with a fully automatic EES (Entry-Exit System) based on passport scanning, but this has yet to be implemented. It was scheduled for 2022, then repeatedly pushed back. The latest launch date was to be five days ago (10 November), but last month the European Commission announced it was being postponed again.

So at the moment, any checking of the 90/180 rule can only be done by examining passport stamps and most border police don't have the time to do this.

However... if the border police detect the overstay your friend can be fined and the amount of the fine varies tremendously from one country to another (Italy is a maximum of €10,000). So I would suggest he/she checks the fine range for the various countries on the Internet, and exits from the cheapest!

I saw somewhere that in at least one country the overstay penalty could be jail. Now, I'm guessing that this would not apply to someone "inadvertently" overstaying a few days, however.... better safe than sorry.