Now, in June 2010, the group of European regional partners is finishing the project ICHNOS+ (www.ichnos-project.org), lead by Ancitel Sardegna, which was dealing with different aspects of business development and European Policies, including the exchange of experiences on networking of One Stop Shops for Business. The idea was to be spread more widely in order to support the simplification of the business start-up and development.

Understanding the specific context of the ICHNOS+ project

The project was dealing with EU policies for business startups, including understanding of the Bolkenstein Directive, the Service Directive, the Small Business Act for Europe, etc.
The project was also to deal with the eGovernment strategies, especially the interoperability aspects. The good practice selected (OSS and RCC) put the value to the management issues of a new services provision and the need to plan the training of the personal. A lot of attention has paid to the technological side of the good practice in order to ensure innovation.

One-stop-shops for all sectors. National governments have agreed that, by the end of 2007, they will:
● set up some form of one-stop shops for business start-ups - so entrepreneurs can carry out all the required procedures (e.g. registration, tax, VAT and social security) via a single administrative contact point, either physical (an office), virtual (web) or both;
● reduce the time taken to register a new business to one week;
● reduce the fees for business start-ups.
In 2008, the European Commission has published the result of the monitoring of the progres of start-up procedures and existence of One-stop-shops across EU member states. The Commission has finalised its assessment of all the 27 Member States on their compliance with the 2006 Spring Council conclusions for start-ups. The results for each of the three areas are:
Number of Member States
Accomplished Not accomplished
One-stop-shop 18 9
Time 13 14
Cost 23 4

Average time and cost to start-up a private limited company is 9 natural days (12 days in 2007) and cost is € 463 (€ 485 in 2007). Despite these changes the number of compliant Member States in terms of times and cost remain unchanged and are exactly the same as in 2007.
Most countries have established a one-stop-shop or equivalent arrangement even though in some cases they do not cover all types of companies: only 2 out of 3 one stop shop systems offer the possibility to register a private limited company.
Member States that fully comply with all three objectives (one-stop-shop, time and cost) are BE, DK, EE, FR, HU, PT, RO, SI and UK. It should be noted, however, that this analysis only looks at the steps to get a company registered. In all countries there are further administrative steps and more time is required before a new SME can start its business operations.
After the end of 2009 all member states are obliged to implement fully the European Services Directive, speaking about Points of single contact.
It will be interesting to know, how EU member states are going and if the exchange of ideas and information may be usefull in this relation.
According to our knowledge, the concept of “Single points of contact” (SPC) fixed by art. 6 of the Services Directive, is very close to the concept of “One Stop Shop” (OSS) used in the ICHNOS project. However, OSS and SPC do not necessarily have the same field of competence. They can have different tasks in different socio-economic and cultural contexts. They can be directly responsible for the registration of business or for the granting of authorisations of a simple nature. But both are dealing very closely with the set of EU policies mentioned above, and also their implementation is still limited by diversed national legislations.
For more information you may have a look at www.ichnos-project.org or contact me.