03.04. Detalle

BRITE will set out to develop and pilot advanced ICT and organizational cross-border solutions for public operators active in “cross-border Business Registration” and in related “e-Government” areas such as financial transparency, financial crime preventions and e-procurement. Its expected impact is wide, affecting the business community, policy makers, researchers, technical innovators, the media, and the European citizenship in general.

The goal is to establish Europe as a dynamic business ecosystem. The EC has adopted a fully integrated approach in the legislation designed to achieve this: regulation to promote transparent financial markets, to facilitate free movement of companies and services, to prevent financial crime. To implement, enforce, amend and maintain these laws in respect of the declared objective will require an unprecedented degree of cross-border and cross-domain interoperability of systems, services and organisations, both public and private.

BRITE will undertake research in knowledge management, will implement and demonstrate novel ICT engineering and will establish a new European cooperation instrument so that public bodies can effectively respond to the changes imposed on them by the new EU laws and new market requirements.

The Business Registers are amongst those public operators most deeply affected by EU Company Law; they represent an enormous potential asset and catalyst for realising the objectives of the related EU legislation. Yet, there is still no EU-wide instrument that makes it possible to exploit this potential by allowing them to adapt in a coordinated manner. BRITE is an initiative that will unlock that potential. It will allow the Business Registers in Europe to effectively respond to legislative changes and contribute to building up the EU market.

BRITE will set out to develop and pilot advanced ICT and organizational cross-border solutions for public operators active in “cross-border Business Registration” and in related “e-Government” areas such as financial transparency, financial crime preventions and e-procurement. Its expected impact is wide, affecting the business community, policy makers, researchers, technical innovators, the media, and the European citizenship in general.

The project duration will be 36 months, with a cost budget of 5.9 M€ and requested grant of 3.5 M€.

In the domains of interest to BRITE, the following remarks are of interest.

Cross border Business Registration. The Business Registers (BRs) are the first, obliged points of contact that companies have with the public administrations. As such, the BRs are obviously instrumental in implementing EU Company Law. The BRs, in an enlarged EU where companies will move freely, need to interact across borders, to exchange company–registration information and to do so despite possible administrative, technical, cultural and language barriers. Simply put, to be effective, each BR needs to be able to “talk” to at least 24 other BRs, and to interpret company-their operational processes and systems so as to perform efficiently.

The BRITE Project will set out to develop the Business Register’s response to these challenging requirements.

BRITE will address cross-border BR interoperability at all levels: abstract, organisational, technical, legal, strategic and managerial. It will also address interoperability across “domains”, i.e. interoperability between the BRs and the public agencies that operate in the selected sub-domains of e-Government.

In the EU, companies and businesses must register with the BR in the country where their seat is established. The BRs are public bodies whose territorial competence may be local or national. The legal status of a BR, its position in a public body, its structure and its competencies are determined by the law of its country.

Company-registration information maintained by the BRs is accessible to the public (under conditions set by the MS). Hence the BRs play a key role on the market since they ensure business transparency – a prerequisite to market trust – and contribute to protecting the rights of all market actors.

Business registration law/regulation is a competence of the Member States (MS); yet, it is EU law that ensures that the principles of free movement of persons, services and capital set forth by the Treaty of Rome are safeguarded. The EU Company Law that is emerging increases the degree of harmonisation of company laws across the MS. EU Company Law has opened (or is about to open) new options for companies that are established in a MS: entrepreneurs may now freely crate a European Company (Societas Europaea, SE), transfer a company seat to another MS, open in a simplified way company branches in other MS, merge their company with companies in other MS, etc. These new opportunities bring about new requirements and services obligations on the BRs. The BRs area now poised to adapt to the changes in EU legislation and must respond within a matter of years.

The BRs must be ready to take on the challenges that face them in the new legal landscape. The BRs are, amongst the Administrations, those where ICT penetration is the highest: there is much ongoing activity in the BRs reading electronic filing, digital signatures, data access and data security.

BRITE’s scientific and technical objectives are to develop, implement and demonstrate an advanced innovative interoperability model, ICT platform and management instrument for BRs to interact across the EU. The BRITE model, platform and instrument will be extended to the interoperability between the BRs and organisations in connected domains of activity.

The work to be carried out will require research in knowledge management, advanced ICT engineering and more classical activities such as prototyping, business analysis, service deployment and marketing. BRITE plans to produce a model that will be accurate, “implementable”, scalable and adaptable.

The model (and its implementation, the ICT platform) should be able to cope with legislation and other changes (e.g. extension of the platform to a new party) in an easy manner, i.e. using knowledge representation rather than data modelling techniques. Domain ontologies will be developed so as to be able to respond to changes by adapting a single knowledge base, no intricate pieces of code.

At a lower level, data representation and exchange will be analysed using emerging standards or solutions; working with the experience of XBRL in the financial field and building on the already done on crXML in commercial registrations. These XML “dialects” define taxonomies for certain domain applications.

Security requirements will impose the use of techniques such as detail signatures an PKI as well as novel webservice-oriented security technologies such as XML Digital Signature, XML-Encryption and WS-Security (privacy and data integrity), traceability (of all process states) and advanced monitoring functions will also be required.

The four components of the BRITE eGovernment Service Cases are:

• Service Case Transfer of Registered Office – enabling cross-border interoperability of BRs throughout Europe to implement recent and forthcoming legislation. This service will be implemented in Sweden, Norway and Ireland.
• Service Case Enforcement and Simplification of the 11th Directive – enabling coordinated enforcement of cross-border branch-related legislation as well as the implementation of initiatives for the simplification of legislation. This service will be implemented in Ireland, Italy and Sweden.
• Service Case Support for eProcurement Take-up – enabling registers to interoperate with entities in other domains to facilitate the implementation of an important priority of the Lisbon Action Plan. This service will be implemented in Italy, Spain and Sweden.
• Service Case Support for Cross-Domain Interoperability – enabling BRs to interoperate with governmental and non-governmental entities in innovative value-adding ways. This service will be implemented in Spain, Italy and Ireland.

Participantes

Documentación

BRITE 158 Kb

Contacto

Dr. Vito Giannella
European Business Register EEIG
Rue de l"Industrie 22 - 1040 Brussels (Belgium)
Tfno.: +32 25141300
Fax: +32 25144445
E-mail: vito.giannella@ebrdirect.be
Web: http://www.ebr.org/