Perspectives for future work

One of the key goals of the NSG&B has been to develop an interoperable area of digital reporting between Nordic countries where the basic business data can be transmitted seamlessly across the borders between authorities and businesses. This is expected to increase the possibilities of Nordic businesses to trade and operate in the region. However, Nordic businesses operate throughout the Single Market of the EU.

Despite the existing and upcoming solutions for digitalisation and interoperability, the EU Commission is yet to come forward with legislation or other tools that would ensure the interoperability of digital reporting. For multinational companies, this results in the need to calibrate their financial administration software to comply with differing legal requirements of the Member States of the EU. This in turn, results in material ICT cost and unproductive administrative work for the businesses. The concern over this issue has been clearly highlighted by stakeholders, businesses, and service providers.

The EU has been active in introducing legislative and other solutions that support digital reporting, and there are elements that can support interoperability. Some of the main deliverables in this area include the Single Digital Gateway regulation, Interoperable Europe Act, eIDAS 2.0 regulation as well as the European Digital Identity Architecture and Reference Framework, for example. However, the EU has not sought a holistic attempt to ensure interoperability of digital business reporting in the EU. As the interoperability appears to be dependent on differing areas of legislation, there would be an intrinsic need for the relevant Directorate Generals of the Commission to work together to achieve true interoperability in the field of digital reporting requirements for businesses. To make this happen, it seems clear that the interoperability of digital business reporting would need to be explicitly noted in the programme (mission letters) of the next Commission college.

On the basis of the NSG&B work, there are identified areas where the European Commission could engage more: 1) identify the useful existing standards and practices and deciding on the obligation to apply these standards 2) create a common semantic data model, i.e. definitions of the exchangeable data required for seamless interoperability and 3) define a de minimis set of technical components for APIs/​data transfer to allow seamless movement of the interoperable data. The experiences of the NSG&B could serve as a basis for the future work in this area.

For the Commission work programme there is a need to emphasize the importance of enhancing digitalisation, increasing the vitality of the Single Market and competitiveness and the need to cut down the administrative burden for businesses. In this vein, the demands for interoperability of digital reporting of business data within the EU would still be responding to many of the needs identified hereinabove. If the effort for interoperability will not be explicitly mentioned in the Commission work programme, the key players of the current NSG&B will need to continue their cooperation and coordination as long as it takes to find remedies to these existing obstacles for businesses to operate within the Single Market.

On the basis of the NSG&B work for the period 2021–2024, possibilities for future work can be highlighted. For each of the four working groups, there are outlined areas for future work as included in the solution area chapters in this report. The aim is to ensure that the deliverables from the NSG&B programme are maintained, partly to ensure that the knowledge and results from NSG&B can be used for further development in the field.

The future work would aim to continue the development of the digital infrastructure for cross-border trade (eDocuments), cross-border interoperability for financial statements and the cross-border sharing of high quality structured data. The work should have the potential to be interoperable on an EU-level and not limited for Nordic or national purposes only.

In defining the scope of future work, it is emphasised that 1) the work is aligned with existing national priorities, and having the relevant government agencies to participate in the different work areas; 2) the work has an appropriate scope, so that it does not overlap with other initiatives in the area, and is coordinated with other initiatives in the area where its relevant e.g. EU-level initiatives; and 3) the work can be self-financed by participating organisations, and 4) relevant stakeholders such as system providers and SME end-users are involved.

The future work is outlined as follows:

Expand development and use of eDocuments for trade between Nordic companies.

Continue a technical working group on standardization and development of eDocuments. Explore how eDocuments can contribute to more automatic data sharing between businesses and authorities to ease the burden of existing and new regulations like CSRD and ViDA. A spin off of the NSG&B work has been to continue the work on including environmental product information into eDocuments to help automate CSRD reporting for companies. The pre-project is called Green eDocuments and is financed under Nordic Council of Ministers. A group of Nordic experts on eDocuments has been conducting workshops in Autumn 2024 to be concluded with a separate report of the findings in the beginning of 2025. The idea is to continue the cooperation in this field in 2025 and beyond.

Cooperation on maintenance and development of the common Nordic semantic data model for annual reports & ESG data. With the further goal to develop interoperability in the Nordic API solution or other relevant areas like the European Unified ID (EUID).

It should be noted that in particular regarding these two areas - eDocuments and Access to high value datasets – it is important to continue involvement of system providers and end-users to support the practical application of the results. This includes areas such as utilizing official registers through the common Nordic API and using Peppol eDocuments for transaction-based VAT reporting or ESG reporting. By engaging system providers, large companies and their SME clients can adopt these solutions, with the validated models then disseminated to other accounting firms and SMEs, promoting wider adoption and consistent implementation.

Focus is on coordinating, sharing experiences, and collaborating on EU initiatives and legislation that impact the digitalisation and automation of key business data in cross border trading. 

Participating organisations have decided to continue the cooperation in the areas mentioned above. The cooperation is manifested in a Memorandum of Understanding outlining the scope and responsibilities of the cooperation. It is planned that three working groups are formed in the above areas with national experts in the field, and that coordination and direction of the work is made by a steering group that has a mandate from participating organisations. The work in this format is to be started in Autumn 2024.