The European Commission presented, on Wednesday 29 March, its proposal for a directive on extending and improving the use of digital tools and processes in EU company law.
“Today, our proposal is mainly aimed at companies, especially SMEs that operate between two or more Member States. We want to remove the obstacles that prevent them from carrying out these activities”, said the EU Commissioner Justice, Didier Reynders.
The text firstly proposes to reduce administrative formalities and burden. The Commission’s proposal thus intends to focus on the application of the principle of single transmission of company information. To this end, the text provides for the use of the Business Registers Interconnection System (BRIS). The data of companies aggregated on BRIS would allow companies that set up a branch in another Member State not to have to provide the information again.
An EU Company Certificate would be introduced. It would contain a set of basic business information and would be available free of charge. This multilingual certificate would aim to “facilitate” the procedures of companies “for calls for tender, tax procedures or applications for financing in other Member States”, Mr Reynders said.
Furthermore, it would be possible, by means of a standardised and multilingual model of digital power of attorney, to authorise a person to represent a company in another Member State. Certain formalities such as apostille or certified translations would be abolished for company documents.
“This text affects nearly 16 million businesses and 2 million partnerships across the EU. It could lead to annual recurrent savings of around €437 million”, Mr Reynders estimated.
Enhanced role of BRIS
In addition, the Commission intends to focus on improving transparency for cross-border activities. In this sense, the text foresees to connect BRIS to national beneficial owner and insolvency registers in order to facilitate the search for information on companies.
Important company information, such as information on partnerships or groups of companies, should also be publicly available through BRIS.
Finally, the text should ensure that company data in business registers is “accurate, reliable and up-to-date”, including by introducing checks on company information before it is entered in business registers in all Member States.
See the proposal: https://aeur.eu/f/647 (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)