The European Commission sought to clarify its ‘non-paper’ on a digital solution to make the prior notification of a posting under the Regulation on the coordination of social security systems operational, in a response to the European Parliament and the EU Council on Thursday 29 October, obtained by EUROPE.
For example, the Commission has indicated that the new system for the Electronic Exchange of Social Security Information (EESSI - see EUROPE 12560/25), which should be fully operational by mid-2022, could serve as a basis for such a system. While the main features of the system remain to be defined by the co-legislators, it could be useful if the information provided in the prior notification is uniform throughout the EU, says the European Commission, adding that it could, if necessary, define the technical details of the system.
Furthermore, the institution states that the notification of the application for form A1 (the document certifying the legislation applicable to a posted worker) should be digitised by the end of 2023. At this stage, 17 Member States have put in place digital procedures to request the A1 form online, the Commission reports.
For exchanges in the context of the coordination of social security systems, the Commission states that the Business Use Case (BUC, which aims to facilitate the electronic exchange of coordination-related messages under the EESSI platform) for the notification of posting should be in production for all participating countries by May 2021, while the full set of EESSI BUCs should be implemented in all Member States by mid-2022.
Towards a conclusive trilogue?
On Thursday 29 October, the European Parliament and the EU Council met once again to discuss the regulation. There were three points left to discuss: - the treatment of frontier and cross-border workers as regards the export of unemployment; - maintaining the concept of working time in the context of pluriactivity; - the issue of pre-notification prior to posting as well as temporal and activity-based exemptions (business travel). At the time of writing, the results of the negotiations were not yet known, but they still seemed far from being concluded.
For European Commission documents: https://bit.ly/2HOuZip and https://bit.ly/2HBYW5u (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)