To implement the once-only principle across borders and in all EU member states, we need to understand what its challenges, needs and benefits exactly are. Our deliverable 4.1 'Gap analysis report of challenges, needs and benefits of the OOP4C analysis' has been submitted to the European Commission. The SCOOP4C team has conducted a gap analysis to see what needs to be done to successfully implement OOP solutions. 

The main objectives:

1) to analyse and synthesise challenges, needs, and benefits of the OOP for citizens and

2) to prioritise these aspects against the vision of OOP formulated in deliverable D 1.1. Challenges, barriers, needs as well as benefits of OOP implementations that were studied based on the state of play report (see deliverable D 1.2) and the stakeholder analysis (see deliverable D 2.1).

Furthermore, the scenario technique was used to depict potential cross-border OOP solutions through future scenarios in five different domains (education, healthcare, moving, social protection, and taxation). The scenarios were used to study gaps, needs, and benefits of OOP in cross-border contexts. This was complemented with desk research as well as participative methods to gather inputs from the stakeholder community. Five stakeholder workshops involving relevant actors of the OOP cases were conducted to validate the scenarios as well as to identify and prioritise gaps and needs of OOP in cross-border contexts. The main concerns were formulated towards political commitment, the legal conditions to enable cross-border OOP solutions, semantic and technical building blocks needed, and the establishment of trust and transparency in the data sharing among public (and private) agencies on personal data of the data subjects. The amplitude of gaps in these gap categories form the most basic requirements for successful OOP implementations.

Gap analysis: 

The identified gaps in the areas of political commitments, legal interoperability, semantic interoperability, technical interoperability, as well as trust and transparency are the ones that mainly threaten the cross-border implementation of the OOP in the domains studied.

So was the 'lack of regulation on national level' identified as a gap in most domains. Since implementing OOP is based on the idea that citizens supply the same data to the public agencies just once and then public administration offices share this data among themselves, the legal frameworks at different levels are necessary to facilitate the data exchange between public authorities, citizens, as well as businesses and NGOs across EU. While EU-wide regulations such as GDPR and eIDAS (and if approved by the European Parliament and Council the SDGR) are in place, there is an essential need for further European level regulation in specific domains (e.g. moving, education) as well as comprehensive regulation on national and local levels to facilitate the cross-border OOP implementations. Nevertheless, varying national regulations as well as different approaches among Member States to implement the same EU regulation were identified as a possible threat for the seamless implementation of the OOP.

The deliverable is still under review by the European Commission - therefore you will have to be registered to our community forum to gain access. Please leave us feedback!