I don't know why people think this. The European Commission Directorate General for Competition lists around 35 thousand cases in their Antitrust and General R

I don't know why people think this. The European Commission Directorate General for Competition lists around 35 thousand cases in their Antitrust and General Registry alone. EU directives are transposed to member states, who are the ones who enforce EU policy. If you're talking about EU members getting hit for non compliance with directive implementation - sure. If you're talking about private sector non compliance with transposed EU directives, that's largely up to how individual member states enforce EU requirements, since EU directives effectively become separate laws once they're transposed by each EU member. As far as I'm aware, there's little aggregated data on how individual member states enforce (as in, number of cases and total amount of fines per year) EU directives. The EU takes in ~4-5 billion Euros per year in assessed fines, but the total amount should be significantly higher once you account for all of the cases/fines that are assessed on private companies, by individual member states, for non compliance with individual state laws implemented to enforce EU directives.