Member States advance Once-Only implementations in two-day testing event
22 March 2024 | 4 minutes read
On 21-22 March 2024, the second Once-Only Technical System Accelerator event brought together 23 participating EU Member States for an intensive interoperability testing session.
This Accelerator, the first of several planned throughout 2024, are opportunities for national development teams to advance and improve on their respective national Once-Only implementations, while benefiting from expert technical support from the European Commission.
In order to live, study, work, retire and do business in other EU countries, people (as individual citizens or businesses) need to complete cross-border admin. Nowadays, most of these administrative procedures are offered online in every Member State. However, to complete these procedures, people are asked to provide authentic documents which they frequently do not possess or may be expired. This means that EU citizens and businesses are faced with the burden of looking for their data on different websites, requesting it, downloading it, etc., all to simply exercise their legal right to move to or operate in another EU country.
The Once-Only system simplifies and accelerates the completion of these procedures by enabling the data – held by governments in national registries across Europe – to be automatically fetched and used as evidence in these procedures, upon their explicit request. This cuts search costs and makes the authentic data come to them directly – and only upon their explicit request. This is the ‘Once-Only’ experience, much less cross-border admin when carrying out administrative procedures.
This Accelerator was a major milestone, allowing countries to consolidate, refine and advance their national Once-Only implementations.
In addition to testing, participants discussed the user experience and user journey for when users request that their data be automatically exchanged through the Once-Only Technical System. The European Commission also presented the OOTS Onbarding Playbook, a recourse helping get national national public bodies, or Competent Authorities, started on their Once-Only Journey. This event also included a session on the Service Metadata Publisher (SMP) of the eDelivery building block, which allows the actual exchange of data in the system.
Following this Accelerator, focus now turns to the fourth OOTS Projectathon on 15-17 May 2024. The Projectathon will bring together the various public bodies (legally known as “Competent Authorities) who possess the legal documents and data that can be exchanged through the Once-Only Technical System.
To learn more about how the Once-Only Technical System will contribute to Europe’s Single Market, visit the Once-Only Hub.