Measuring the Impact of the Once Only Principle for Businesses Across Borders

Abstract

The Once-Only Principle (OOP) holds that public administrations ideally collect data from citizens and businesses only once to share this information, within regulatory limits, with other administrative bodies and across Member States. The aim of the OOP is to simplify interaction with public services and contribute to administrative burden reduction. To demonstrate the cross-border application of the OOP for businesses, the Large Scale Pilot European project ‘The Once Only Principle Project (TOOP)’ develops pilots and identifies benefits and challenges as well as (potential) impacts of the adoption of this principle. In this chapter, we explore an Impact Assessment framework for measuring the impact of the OOP on cross-border services for businesses and subsequently validate this framework with members from the TOOP project. During stakeholder sessions organized for this purpose, we find that the OOP potentially has a high impact on government, e.g. by enabling fraud reduction, yet little is known about the impact of the OOP on businesses, and in particular on its cross-border impact. The expected benefits of the OOP likely emerge on the longer term, making identification of short-term impacts challenging. Nonetheless, based on our findings, we recommend to develop and implement methods and tools to measure the impact on the long-term to increase sustainability of the OOP.