The once-only principle is an e-government concept that aims to ensure that citizens, institutions, and companies only have to provide certain standard information to the authorities and administrations once.
The once-only principle is part of the European Union's (EU) plans to further develop the Digital Single Market by reducing the administrative burden on citizens and businesses.
[2] The EU-wide application of once-only is also one of the pillars of the strategy for the Digital Single Market[3] and one of the basic principles of the EU eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020.
Applying this principle the citizen can have non-linkable but fully functional and legal identities that are not linkable even within the same application in the same database in the same member state.
In addition to the technical and economic issues, there is a real concern that government-centric model similar to data retention will prove incompatible with GDPR and Human Rights article 8 as it requires government profiling citizen in order to detect attempted requests for data already collected for another purpose.
[10] According to a study carried out on behalf of the European Commission, once-only encounters technical, organisational, semantic, and legal obstacles to implementation throughout the EU.
[12] A representative survey on e-government in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 2017 showed that the majority of the population in each country is rather skeptical.
[10] The most advanced once-only infrastructures exist in Belgium, Estonia and the Netherlands, which have national legislation and enforce its implementation.
In emergency situations, an electronic first aid card can be generated in the ambulance after identification of the patient, which provides vital data to the first responders.
Patients can view their medical records online (authentication takes place via eID) and allow access to the care providers.
In the area of business services, a number of common transactions (e. g. registration of company name and address, withholding tax and social security contributions from wages) can be carried out online using pre-entered forms.
The administrative burden of setting up a business is also considered low due to the extensive re-use of data from public sector databases.
[23] The MAGDA platform (Maximum Data Sharing between Agencies) is a once-only principle implementation supporting electronic delivery of public services, at the federal, regional, and local levels of the government.
The platform enables the reuse and sharing of citizens’ and companies’ data between the Flemish government authorities (190 agencies and 13 departments).
[24] The platform allows citizens and businesses to enter or update their data only once, from a single point of access, to be used by all public authorities.
[25] Austria has set itself the goal of advancing once-only integration in the field of eGovernment services in the coming years.
For the moment (2018), the most visible effort is on the annual tax form for individuals, which is now mostly pre-filled for everybody, using data existent on several different national offices.
[30] Denmark has for many years been pursuing the government-centric once-only model with significant focus on central sharing and citizen profiling.
[33] A general purpose implementation of the once-only is the national Data Intermediation Platform (DIP),[34] as a result of a collaboration effort involving the whole Spanish public sector.
The DIP was launched in 2007 by the Spanish Government to publish and consume services for electronic data interchange with the aim to grow and to be re-used by all Administrations.
Using the DIP with the SCSP protocol, public bodies in charge of administrative procedures can automatically check the required information without document submission by the citizens.
[37] The aim of the EU's large scale pilot e-SENS was to enable digital, cross-border management through generic and reusable technical components in the European Union.
[38] As part of the Citizen Lifecycle area of e-SENS, Sweden has been testing a new online service since 2016, providing third country students access to academic programmes at Stockholm University.
The pilot project uses eID to identify and register, using a federal cross-border authentication tool supported by e-SENS, a large-scale EU initiative.
[44] It provides a service through which citizens, businesses and public administrations can access information on companies and their branches established in other Member States in accordance with Directive 2017/17/EC.
The aim of the initiative is to examine how better provision of public services to citizens can be achieved by applying the once-only principle.
SCOOP4C was established to analyze implementation barriers, generate once-only research and identify and link relevant EU stakeholders.
To this end, the initiative regularly organises EU-wide workshops and events on the subject and provides an online knowledge base, a community platform and a best practice database.
aiming to implement full-service eIDAS 5.2 identities including legal signing, payments, data sharing, credentials validation and communication WITHOUT digital identification in the transaction.
The project aims to implement two large-scale Privacy by Design pilots – one on one Identity, payments and tax compliance and one on Personal Medicine ensuring strong anonymity around genome-related SmallData research and treatment.