Greece will interconnect over 1000 civic registry offices in January in order to create the Hellenic Citizens’ Registry and to reduce the administrative burden for citizens and public administrations immensely. This new information system of the Ministry of Interior transforms administrative procedures and will allow citizens to only provide their data once.

The Hellenic Citizens’ Registry will connect 1036 Registry Offices, 325 Civil Service Offices and the Athens Special Registry Office and will go into productive operation on Monday, January 22nd 2018. This will drastically decrease bureaucratic procedures in Greece.

This registry allows for faster and easier administrative organization on a civil and municipal level in Greece. The administrative procedures for data processing, maintenance and disposal are simplified, while it is expected that citizens will no longer be obliged to gather and provide many documents for simple procedures.

It is expected that the request of relevant certificates and other documents by third party bodies in the public and wider public sector will be phased out. It will no longer be necessary to use the relevant municipal offices or the one-stop-shops for issuing certificates and other documents such as copies of civil status, family share, etc., since the requested information will be available electronically to the relevant third party bodies via secure electronic interconnection. Thus, from now on, citizens of the Greek state will need to provide registry and civil data to public administration once only.

In order to carry out the necessary technical deployment and data migration, a short interruption of the electronic registration and processing of registry data will take place from Friday, January 12th to January 16th 2018. During this interruption, no record, deletion, completion or change of registry and civil data will be made, except in manuscripts at the reasoned request of the person concerned.  In these exceptional cases, the data will be introduced into the Citizens’ Registry with priority, with the start of its productive operation.

With this step, the Greek government is realizing an important milestone in implementing the once-only principle and drastically reducing the administrative burden of citizens.

For more information: 

• News Greek CNN (in Greek) 
• Legislative text from e-nomothesia.gr (in Greek) 
• Best practice case (SCOOP4C Knowledge Base)