This bill would stop Portuguese public services asking you for papers the state already holds
The Council of Ministers approved a legislative authorisation making the iAP platform compulsory for data sharing between public bodies. What passed is permission to legislate, not the rule itself.
If you live in Portugal you have done this. Queued for a certificate at one counter in order to hand it in at another. Printed a proof of address the state itself issued, so you could give it back to the state. Carried a tax clearance certificate across town to a service that could have looked it up in seconds.
On 20 August the Council of Ministers approved a legislative authorisation bill creating a legal regime for the interoperability of data and documents across public administration. It puts into Portuguese law what Brussels calls the once-only principle: if one public service already holds the information, the next one asks that service, not you.
The platform exists. The obligation did not
The iAP, the public administration’s interoperability platform, has been running for years. The gap was never the plumbing. It was that nothing forced anyone to connect to it, so each body decided for itself whether its systems would talk to anyone else’s, and plenty decided not to. That decision is why the paper kept travelling in a folder under your arm.
The bill makes iAP use compulsory for sharing data and documents between public entities. It also sets rules on security, traceability and personal data protection, which is the other half of the story. An administration that swaps citizens’ records among itself with no record of who looked at what is faster and harder to hold to account.
The step that usually takes the time
Here is the part worth holding on to. What left the Council of Ministers is not a decree-law in force. It is a bill seeking authorisation to legislate, and it now goes to parliament. Deputies have to pass it before the government can write the actual regime.
We have seen this film before. Legislative authorisations expire unused, and statutory deadlines slide by without the promised text ever appearing, as happened this month with the nationality law’s missing regulation. Until parliament votes, nothing changes at the counter.
Who feels the difference most
If you were born here, have a settled address and deal with the state a handful of times a year, this costs you the occasional lost morning. If you arrived recently it costs far more. Every residence application, every renewal, every NIF or health number request drags the same bundle of certificates between services that do not speak to each other. It is the same friction behind the push to spread AIMA appointments out of Lisbon.
It is also the direction Europe is already moving in. The rules on data from connected products, which start applying on 12 September, rest on the same instinct in a different setting: whoever generates the data should control it, rather than ferry it from hand to hand.
The idea is a good one and it is twenty years old. The question is whether it finishes the journey this time.
By Oliver Grant
Photo: GualdimG / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
