The Once Only Principle should be applied throughout the whole of Europe
An initial meeting of consortium representatives of the TOOP (The Once Only Principle) project from 21 European countries took place in Tallinn, Estonia´s capital, at the end of January. This project was initiated by the European Commission on 1 January 2017 within the Horizon 2020 programme in order to ensure implementation of “The Once Only Principle”.
The TOOP project is part of the EU eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020 and will contribute towards increasing the efficiency of the Digital Single Market. The goal of TOOP is to allow cross-border cooperation among public authorities and promote the business activities of companies across borders. This step eliminates unnecessary burdens for European companies which are asked to present the same data and documents repeatedly.
PosAm is a representative of Slovakia in the consortium. Its experts contributed also in the planning and preparation of the project. “When working on the TOOP project, we will use our experience and knowledge from introducing The Once Only Principle in Slovakia. We have only recently celebrated the third anniversary of introducing PosAm´s Register účtovných závierok (Registry of Financial Statements) system. The aim was to introduce this principle into the communication of economic operators with public authorities,” says Peter Kolesár, a director for public authorities at PosAm.
PosAm is also a coordinator for Slovak public institutions that will participate in the pilot project. Presently, the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic and the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic are participating in it. For maximum effect of “The Once Only Principle”, also other institutions will be gradually invited to participate.
Three pilot projects
The introduction of “The Once Only Principle” across countries will first be tested in three pilot projects. These will be cross-border electronic services for business mobility, updating connected company data, and on-line access to ship and crew certificates for ship transport. In these pilots up to 60 information systems from 21 European countries can be inter-connected. The pilots will not only test the proposed architecture and technologies but also help administrations and businesses to speed up service provision and enable SMEs to operate easily within the EU Digital Single Market.
Connecting to existing programmes and initiatives
The TOOP project has the ultimate goal of developing a proposal for innovative federative architecture enabling the inter-connection and cooperation of particular national registries and systems at a Europe-wide level. This architecture will support the cross-border cooperation of public authorities in particular European countries and international business activities. For this purpose, TOOP will consider the possibilities of existing EU frameworks (EIRA, EIF) and the use of existing IT components (so-called Building Blocks) developed within the e-SENS project and operated as Digital Services Infrastructures of the Connecting Europe Facility.