STORK 2.0 project was initiated with the aim, among others, of developing an operational framework and infrastructure encompassing eID for secure electronic authentication of legal persons, including facilities for the management of representation powers and mandates.
In that sense, the project has achieved significant results, evolving STORK specifications to include attributes for legal persons and representation powers and mandates, and adapting the software building blocks to allow cross-border transfer of this kind of information. The feasibility of the developed solution has been verified by means of the STORK 2.0 pilots, in which use cases that require cross-border access to information about representation capabilities have been successfully tested.
However, the project has also found important barriers that currently hinder the adoption of an EU wide solution for cross-border transfer of representation information, one of the most relevant being the lack of a common semantic framework. Representation is complex and the national solutions are often too much focused on country specific details. Therefore, although there are some similarities among countries, there is not a shared European taxonomy about representation powers and mandates, what prevents powers/mandates information originated in one country from being directly machine processable in other.
Additionally, the need for service providers of having powers/mandates information together with the data regarding the represented and representing persons in order to properly assess the scope of the transactions that the representing person is allowed to perform on behalf of the represented one, has been steadily highlighted in the discussions of the eIDAS expert group.
Taking into account that the goal of the European Commission ISA2 programme is the promotion of interoperable electronic public services, and that it includes specific actions about semantic interoperability like the ISA core vocabularies, there is an opportunity for continuing the work done in STORK 2.0 and other initiatives regarding representation powers/mandates under the scope of the ISA2 programme and, by incorporating the results of this action in the eIDAS interoperability framework, keep progressing towards the single digital market and the semantic harmonisation Europe-wide. In that sense, an evolution of the ISA Core Vocabularies to extend the Core Person and Core Business vocabularies with a common taxonomy for representation powers/mandates linked to legal entities may be one of the potential initiatives to be taken over by the ISA2 programme.
