The main goal of the Moving Abroad pilot is to facilitate the evidence exchange when citizens are moving abroad with a series of three use cases (address change, a request for a birth, marriage or death certificate, and a request for pension information and/or a pension claim). The benefits of this will be fewer physical movements of citizens to fetch the
evidence and less interventions of civil servants resulting in a faster evidence exchange.
In general terms the requirement of the pilot is to deliver evidence online, in real-time, in a structured (data) format to the citizen as part of a procedure that is related to an address change, a request for a birth, marriage or death certificate or a request for pension information and/or a pension claim when moving abroad. As a prerequisite of this, the citizen will have to be authenticated via eIDAS and linked to the evidence via a national registration number of the foreign country. In some cases, civil servants will intervene to link the citizen - based on this eIDAS identification - to the national number.
The main actor will be the citizen requesting information for himself or on behalf of the persons for whom he is legally authorised to do so.
The existing infrastructure in the Member States depends on whether the Napoleonic Code was instituted or not. Member States that follow the Napoleonic law have a civil state register that holds legal certificates of birth, marriage, and death. In the other Member States only a population register is present holding the information for all citizens that can reside in the country for a longer period. The latter is the case in the Scandinavian countries. These registers can be central registers or locally managed registers.
Regarding the evidence, for the use cases one and two we have opted to follow the EC regulation 2016/1191. In this regulation it is foreseen that each EU country must be able to exchange evidence on the life, birth, marriage and death events in a multilingual (data) form. The Life Event encompasses most of the evidence that is needed to register in a foreign country, a procedure of which “Change of address” is part off.
By doing so, the DE4A pilot and framework will support/enforce the awareness and practical
implementation of this regulation which has been applicable to all EU Member States since February 2019.
Depending on the country, the evidence will be available in a structured multilingual form and/or as structured data. The fact that this evidence exchange is foreseen in an active regulation makes the adoption by the Member State explicit.
The main barriers the pilot will have to face are that some participating Member States…
• Are not yet eIDAS notified.
This is the preferred solution to authenticate the citizen requesting evidence. Other solutions exist but require a physical movement of the citizen to the consulate or involved service in the country providing the evidence and do not offer online in real time access to the evidence.
• Have no mechanism today to link the eIDAS information to the authentic source that contains the evidence (by a national registration number).
• Only allow the exchange of evidence with other Member States in case the evidence is requested by/for the citizen himself.
• Request that the citizen is physically present to initiate the procedure. In this case the pilot will help (only) to fetch the evidence electronically at that moment.
• Have the requested evidence not in an electronic format immediately available and cannot provide the evidence online in real time. Although several Member States have a mechanism to migrate the requested evidence on demand. If it can temporarily put the procedure on hold, this will have an impact on the volume of evidence that can be exchanged with the pilot.
Further, the evidence exchanges in the DE4A project, which is based on the regulation 2016/1191 for the use cases one and two - address change, a request for a birth, marriage or death certificate – might conflict with the definitions of the Deloitte study which was elaborated as part of the SDGR project.
For the third use case – request pension information and/or claim pension – there might be an overlap with the EESSI project (which is another European project in the social security sector) where this information is already exchanged. Further investigation and discussions
are needed to determine how the DE4A initiative can be integrated with EESSI initiative.
