The Once-Only Principle: A Matter of Trust

The Single Market is one of the cornerstones of the European Union. The idea to transform it into a Digital Single Market (DSM) was outlined several years ago. The EU has started different initiatives to support this transformation process. One of them is the program Horizon 2020 to support the process from a technical point of view. In parallel to this, initiatives were started to set up a sound legal framework for the DSM. The Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR) is an outcome of these initiatives. The key aspect of the SDGR is the underlying Once-Only Principle (OOP), outlining that businesses and citizens in contact with public administrations have to provide data only once. “The Once-Only Principle Project (TOOP)” is the EU-funded project initiated for research, testing, and implementation of the OOP in Europe. The authors give an overview of the research questions of the different parts of TOOP. Besides that, they introduce the other chapters of this book and what the reader can expect as the content of them.

Once-Only Principle Good Practices in Europe

Digital transformation has become a recent keyword in the evolution of public sector modernization through the once-only principle (OOP). The once-only principle is among the seven driving principles in the eGovernment Action Plan 2016–2020 of the European Commission (EC). It requires that citizens and businesses need not to provide the same data to governments if that data is already in their hands. The ultimate goal of the principle is to reduce administrative burden and to simplify public service provisioning therewith also reducing costs and improving public service. To boost developments towards administrative burden reduction and simplification in public service provisioning, the SCOOP4C project has investigated good practice solutions across Europe. In this contribution, we provide an overview of good practice OOP cases and OOP enablers studied in the project, followed by a synthesis of the benefits and key enablers to boost the OOP implementation across Europe.

Drivers for and Barriers to the Cross-border Implementation of the Once-Only Principle

The once-only principle (OOP) aims to reduce interactions between citizens and governments, but many factors challenge its cross-border implementation. Building on the results of the “The Once-Only Principle Project” (TOOP, 2017–2021), an analysis was undertaken of the factors that either support or hinder implementation of the cross-border OOP. Five domains of factors were examined - technological, organizational, institutional aspects, actors and miscellaneous. This research highlights the importance of awareness of the OOP, and its inherent benefits, as a key driver. Also, the activities of supranational entities are of key significance, as it is establishing a critical legal framework. Co-ordination between different levels of government and different countries remains an important barrier. One specific issue discovered and addressed during the project but uncovered here, relates to identity matching, and this requires EU level intervention to reach an effective and efficient solution.

TOOP Pilot Experiences: Challenges and Achievements in Implementing Once-Only in Different Domains and Member States

The Once-Only Principle (OOP) enables public administrations to support citizen and business life-cycle oriented issues as opposed to mere integration of administrative systems designed to serve bureaucratic ends. The Once-Only Principle project (TOOP) was funded by the EU Program Horizon 2020, with the aim to explore and demonstrate the OOP through multiple sustainable pilots in different domains, using a federated architecture on a cross-border collaborative pan-European scale, enabling the connection of different registries and architectures in different countries for better exchange of information across public administrations. The different pilot domains (eProcurement, Maritime and General Business Mobility) identified potential use cases suitable to show the OOP, defined the goals and expected benefits of TOOP based on motivational scenarios and process analyses and provided requirements to the TOOP Reference and Solution Architectures. Especially for the General Business Mobility domain requirements were provided also from the Single Digital Gateway Regulation. These requirements guided the development of the TOOP specifications and the TOOP components, the Member States deployed the TOOP specifications and components and participated in different connectathons demonstrating the OOP.

TOOP Trust Architecture

While information security nowadays represents a core concern for any organization, Trust Management is usually less elaborated and is only important when two or more organizations cooperate towards a common objective. The overall Once-Only Principle Project (TOOP) architecture relies on the concept of trusted sources of information and on the existence of a secure exchange channel between the Data Providers and the Data Consumers in this interaction framework. Trust and information security are two cross-cutting concerns of paramount importance. These two concerns are overlapping, but not identical and they span all of the interoperability layers, from the legal down to the technical, passing through organizational and semantic layers. While information security aims at the preservation of confidentiality, integrity and availability of information, trust establishment guarantees that the origin and the destination of the data and documents are authentic (authenticity) and trustworthy (trustworthiness), and that data and documents are secured against any modification by untrusted parties (integrity). In this chapter, the TOOP Trust Architecture is presented, starting from a simple abstract model of interaction between two agents down to the detailed end-to-end trust establishment architecture, modeled onto the Toop Reference Architecture presented in the previous chapter.

The Future of the Once-Only Principle in Europe

The Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR) and the underlying Once-Only Principle (OOP) outline that businesses and citizens in contact with public administrations have to provide data only once. The chapter gives an overview based on the findings of the EU-funded “The Once-Only Principle Project (TOOP)”. The authors summarise the developments related to the once-only principle and the SDGR in Europe. They also outline a vision for the future of the OOP in Europe. The vision is based on the analysis and the key take-aways from the previous chapters of this book. It also highlights the next steps to further improve the technical and legal basis and the chances given by the update of the eIDAS regulation. Furthermore, an opportunity for the sustainability of the OOP and the TOOP is described.

The Single Digital Gateway Regulation as an Enabler and Constraint of Once-Only in Europe

The adoption of the Single Digital Gateway Regulation is a gamechanger in European e-government. For the first time, it creates a horizontal, non-sector specific legal framework for the direct exchange of digital evidence between public administrations in different Member States. However, these exchanges require public administrations to have a certain degree of trust in each other, which is built on a shared legal basis. The Single Digital Gateway Regulation achieves its goal of creating a legal basis and establishing trust, but also builds in a number of explicit and implicit legal constraints. These will help make the once-only principle in Europe a reality, but also enshrine limitations that will require revisions and expansions of the Regulation at some point in the future. This paper examines the genesis of the Regulation, its legal choices and priorities, the resulting implications and limitations, and potential challenges for the future.

Implementation of the ‘Once-Only’ Principle in Europe – National Approach

The ‘once-only’ principle (OOP) in the context of the public sector means that citizens and businesses supply data only once to a public administration. The role of public administrations is to internally share these data also across borders so that no additional burden falls on citizens and businesses. This paper presents what steps are taken to implement the OOP both on the European and national level. The national approach in European countries towards implementing the OOP is analysed and compared in terms of legislation, strategies and infrastructure. The most important benefits of the OOP are described as well. One of the most important initiatives in Europe to explore and demonstrate the OOP in practice is the TOOP project. The paper presents how TOOP technical solution is practically implemented within three pilot areas: general business mobility, e-procurement, maritime domain.

Legal Basis and Regulatory Applications of the Once-Only Principle: The Italian Case

This study presents how the OOP is related to the constitutional and institutional principles concerning the good performance and impartiality of public authorities and the protection of citizens’ rights against the action of public administration, with special regard to the Italian regulatory framework. The national path towards the implementation of the principle is examined, starting from the obligation of the use of self-certifications in place of certificates and the automatic acquisition of data and documents in administrative procedures down to the digitalization of administrations and the interoperability of public databases. A specific paragraph is devoted to the OOP in public procurement, as crucial for development of the European digital single market.

The Technical Challenges in OOP Application Across the European Union and the TOOP OOP Architecture

The Once-Only Principle requires the public administrations to ensure that citizens and businesses supply the same information only once to the Public Administration as a whole. Widespread use of the Once-Only Principle has the potential to simplify citizens’ life, make businesses more efficient, and reduce administrative burden in the European Union. The Once-Only Principle project (TOOP) is an initiative, financed by the EU Program Horizon 2020, to explore the possibility to enable the cross-border application of the Once-Only Principle by demonstrating it in practice, through the development of selected piloting applications for specific real-world use cases, enabling the connection of different registries and architectures in different countries for better exchange of information across public administrations. These piloting ICT systems are designed as a result of a pan-European collaboration and they adopt a federated model, to allow for a high degree of independence between the participating parties in the development of their own solutions. The main challenge in the implementation of an OOP solution is the diversity of organizations, procedures, data, and services on all four main levels of interoperability: legal, organizational, semantic, and technical. To address this challenge, TOOP is developing and testing the TOOP Reference Architecture (TOOPRA) to assist organizations in the cross-border implementation of the OOP. The paper outlines the TOOPRA users, principles, and requirements, presents an overview of the architecture development, describes the main views of TOOPRA, discusses architecture profiling, and analyses the TOOPRA sustainability issues.