Digital Assembly 2019: Trusted eGovernment: Interoperability & once-only principles for a Digital Europe
Europe’s Single Market is one of the EU’s greatest successes. It has stimulated considerably intra-EU trade in goods, which more than quadrupled from € 800 to € 3.063 billion per year, with 3.5 million people crossing an internal Schengen border every day.
Meanwhile, the digitalisation of services and procedures means citizens and businesses can interact with public administrations with greater ease. But ensuring trust in digital transactions is fundamental to their increased adoption. In addition, an absence of interoperability between digital public services means that Europeans risk not taking full advantage of what Digital has to offer.
The European Commission has launched a wide-range of initiatives, from Europe-wide platforms promoting interoperability to leading-edge legislation supporting all policy domains.
The Single Digital Gateway will facilitate online access to the information, administrative procedures and assistance services in the Single Market. A fundamental enabling principle of the Single Digital Gateway is the 'once-only' principle. This means that citizens and businesses provide diverse data only once in contact with public administrations, while public administration bodies take actions to share and reuse these data – even across borders – with the consent of the citizen and always respecting data protection. This means that by 2023, citizens can ask their public administration to share certain documents with other European public administration, which makes it possible to perform a number of procedures, such as registering a car or claiming a pension, in all EU member states without the need to submit documents that the citizen already submitted elsewhere.
The European Commission supports cross-border use of the once-only principle with the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eID, eSignature and eDelivery Building Blocks. More than just standards-based modular solutions, these Building Blocks directly support not only the Single Digital Gateway but also the implementation of the eIDAS Regulation (on electronic identification and trust services). eIDAS ensures that people and businesses can use their own national eIDs to access public services in other EU countries and creates a cross-border market for e-signatures, electronic seals, etc. In addition, the ISA² programme's Framework for Base Registry Access supports the cataloguing of existing data sources at EU level, the so-called Registry of Registries. It is composed of a data model and few taxonomies to classify and harmonise at EU level public public services, life and business events and evidences.
The European Commission will present these at the stand Trusted eGovernment: Interoperability & once-only principles for a Digital Europe, during the Digital Assembly 2019, held in the context of the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU.