We consider a surface integral formulation of the so-called interior transmission problem that appears in the study of inverse scattering problems from dielectric inclusions. In the case where the magnetic permeability contrast is zero, the main originality of our approach consists in still using classical potentials for the Helmholtz equation but in weaker trace space solutions. One major outcome of this study is to establish Fredholm properties of the problem for relaxed assumptions on the material coefficients. For instance we allow the contrast to change sign inside the medium. We also show how one can retrieve discreteness results for transmission eigenvalues in some particular situations.