The single digital gateway facilitates online access to information, administrative procedures, and assistance services that EU citizens and businesses may need in another EU country. Access to the gateway is via a search function in the Your Europe portal, which has been providing EU and national information on the rights of citizens and businesses, as well as access to assistance services, since 2006.
Following the adoption of the gateway regulation in 2018, the European Commission and national administrations are developing a network of national portals to provide information for citizens and businesses on
- how EU rules are applied in each EU country for cross-border users
- how to access these pertinent administrative procedures online
- available assistance services
National websites participating in the gateway can be easily recognised by having the Your Europe logo.
On 12 December 2023, the gateway launched the core infrastructure of the Once-Only Technical System (OOTS), a milestone in the implementation of the single digital gateway. This new EU-wide solution will make cross-border paperwork significantly more efficient and less costly for citizens, companies, and public administrations.
Citizens and businesses will have soon access through Your Europe to a large number of procedure areas, making processes such as registering a car or claiming a pension being fully digitalised, while also reducing red tape.
Thanks to OOTS, when completing an online procedure in one Member State, EU citizens and businesses will be able to make an explicit request to automatically and securely retrieve official documents or structured data (known as ‘evidence’) from a public authority’s eGovernment portal in another Member State. For example, a diploma or driving licence can be automatically exchanged with a competent authority in another EU country (e.g. educational institutions, population registers or company registers).
Therefore, while remaining fully in control of their own data, citizens and businesses will no longer have to retrieve and provide the same documents repeatedly. With the new system, they will be able to have their documents exchanged automatically within the Single Market by simply asking the relevant authorities to retrieve them directly from authentic sources.
The next step is to onboard the various
- evidence requesters
- evidence providers (such as university portals or vehicle registration agencies)
- intermediary platforms (such as a dedicated service organisation in a Member State that stores and makes available educational evidences on behalf of educational institutions, for example).
Such an onboarding of roughly 80 000 EU national competent authorities will allow citizens and companies to fully benefit from the Single Market.
Finally, to improve policy making, users are also able to provide feedback through the gateway on obstacles they encounter in the Single Market through the SMOT tool on the Your Europe Portal. The European Commission uses this tool to collect all feedback anonymously and see how policies can be improved for all, allowing citizens and businesses to have a say in the Single Market's future.
EU citizens and businesses, especially those operating in another EU country often struggle to understand the rules that apply to their particular case or the steps required to carry out simple procedures. Searching for information is often a tiresome and confusing process. Results tend to be scattered across different websites that often lack any guarantee of quality or reliability, and significant information gaps remain in many areas, leaving important questions unanswered.
A number of procedures are still paper based only or require queuing in an office, which can be a waste of time and money. Cross-border users also often run into obstacles with national administrative procedures because they only work with national phone numbers, postal codes, or payment methods. Additionally, many citizens and companies are unaware of available assistance services to help them solve their problems.
All these obstacles hold back the consolidation of a genuine Single Market where the freedom of goods, services, capital, and people is fully ensured. It also hampers the establishment of a digital single market by building unnecessary online barriers between people in different EU countries.
To address these problems, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union adopted a regulation establishing a single digital gateway on 2 October 2018. The single digital gateway is expected to save companies more than €11 billion per year and boost cross-border activity.
- The Your Europe portal provides access to a network of national portals in compliance with the single digital gateway regulation
- Regulation (EU) 2018/1724 establishing a single digital gateway to provide information, procedures, assistance and problem solving services
- SDG Library - legal requirements, technical specifications and work programmes
- Video: Building the single digital gateway together
- Video: Building the single digital gateway together (shorter version for assistance services)
Contact
GROW-SINGLE-DIGITAL-GATEWAYEC [dot] EUROPA [dot] EU (GROW-SINGLE-DIGITAL-GATEWAY[at]EC[dot]EUROPA[dot]EU)