12 January 2023

The European Single Market is one of the EU's greatest achievements and success stories. This year, we celebrate its 30th anniversary. Pearle*, Ceemet and ECEG believe in the free movement of workers and freedom to provide services. However, there is currently a patchwork of national regulations that makes these freedoms considerably more difficult to exercise and lead to a disproportionate administrative and unnecessary burden.

Along with Ceemet and ECEG, we strongly support the European Commission's initiative to create an "eDeclaration" in order to standardise and simplify the reporting obligations for postings within the European Union.

From our point of view, to have a fully effective device, the following points must be taken into account:

• The eDeclaration will only bring relief if it is applied as widely as possible. We therefore prefer a uniform solution throughout Europe - analogue to Regulation (EU) 2021/954 on the digital COVID certificate.
• The eDeclaration must be uniform across the 27 EU Member States.
• The eDeclaration should have a low-threshold, user-friendly format, ideally in the form of an app for smartphones and other mobile devices.
• In many Member States, the application for the A1 certificate as proof of social security has now been digitalised. Consequently, it must at least be possible to integrate the A1 certificate into the eDeclaration.
• The eDeclaration should also be usable (at least in the long term) for countries which are not members of the EU/EEA.