The Single Digital Gateway (SDG) facilitates online access to information, administrative procedures, and assistance services that citizens and businesses require to become active in another EU country. As a result, citizens and companies moving across EU borders can find out in advance which rules and assistance services apply in their new residence. Moreover, thanks to the SDG, one can perform several procedures in any of the EU Member States without any physical paperwork, such as registering a car or claiming pension benefits.
The Regulation stipulates that a Once Only Technical System (OOTS) is established for the transmission of electronic evidence required for the fulfilment of procedures across borders. For a number of online procedures, the Single Digital Gateway aims to operate through such Once-Only Technical System, which will allow for automatic cross border exchange of evidence data between competent authorities. This will enable Evidence Requesters (competent authorities) in one Member State to automatically retrieve necessary data from Evidence Providers (other competent authorities holding the evidence), with the user’s explicit consent. In Malta, the Ministry for the Economy, Enterprise and Strategic Projects assisted by a dedicated MITA team, facilitated the development of an integration layer for service providers, a central preview space and data service for evidence providers, along with dedicated eDelivery access nodes to be used by Maltese competent authorities.
Malta has been continuously improving its technical readiness at EU level over a number of EU Commission led events known as projectathons in the past months. A 5th Projectathon emphasising peer-to-peer interoperability and compliance testing was held in Brussels over three days in late November 2024.
The Malta team performed essential production readiness checks with some Member States, using a dedicated service provider developed in consultation with the University of Malta to simulate enrolment by European citizens in Maltese degree courses. The aim was to clock in as many test cases as possible, reaching out to various Member States to verify and connect our systems. The results of the achievements obtained in this last projectathon were provided by the Commission on 10 December.
Malta has now managed to reach Step 6 of the Accelerometer showing its technical preparedness of being production ready (together with another 5 other MS) and in a position to officially launch the onboarding process for the Maltese competent authorities. This will be a challenging next step but one which competent authorities need to embrace and take forward.
