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What is IMI?

What Who Structure Coordinators Areas

(You will find an informative description of the system somewhat more extensive in this brochure)

The single market is a barrier-free space (allowing the free movement of goods, services, people and capital) that offers interesting opportunities to European citizens and businesses and is one of the fundamental elements of the European economy. It is subject to a complex mix of rules (treaties, harmonised and national rules and the principle of mutual recognition).

The construction of the internal market requires cooperation between competent authorities of the states of the European Economic Area.

Public authorities (whether national, regional or local) are responsible for ensuring compliance with the rules governing the internal market for which they need to cooperate closely based on mutual trust and on appropriate tools capable of overcoming practical barriers such as language, administrative structure, etc.

El IMI (Internal Market Information System) is a secure and multilingual online tool that facilitates the exchange of information between public authorities, both of the Member States and of the Commission and EU institutions, involved in the practical implementation of European legislation. Although IMI’s end users are national public authorities, the beneficiaries of this improved administrative cooperation are citizens and companies.

IMI helps the authorities to carry out their administrative cooperation obligations in various areas of the Internal Market and can adapt with zero or minimal effort to accommodate areas additional to those currently envisaged. The IMI network already connects thousands of public authorities. It has succeeded in modernising cross-border cooperation and ensuring that the internal market works in practice.

The mechanisms foreseen in IMI include the most common cooperation procedures:

  • The queries are ‘one-to-one’ exchanges between two final competent authorities. For example, it is a question of consulting with a public authority in another state to recognise the qualification of a person to practice a profession, or of facilitating the provision of services to an individual or company based in another state by going to an authority in another state to validate or consult some data or document (instead of loading the evidence on the interested party).
  • notifications and alerts are one-many exchanges that allow Member States to share information with other EMMs or the Commission. They serve to manage in the manner provided by the legislation certain situations such as alerts that require urgent communication and dissemination to the authorities that may need to know about them, or notifications of information or national legislation to the Commission and the EEMMs with possible processes of debate or approval, among other uses.
  • The repositories IMI allow authorities to share information related to a given area in a centralized database. They can receive both archived documents and structured information through forms with fields. For example, a repository of licenses that can be consulted by the relevant authorities of any state, a repository of models of national documents, or others.
  • A public interface allows external agents to communicate with the competent authorities registered in IMI. IMI is not directly accessible to citizens or companies, but procedures such as the application for a 'European Professional Card' or the Solvit cases initiated by citizens and companies trigger the interaction in IMI of administrations of the Member States involved.

How to effectively cooperate with possible thousands of competent authorities often unknown in other states (with other languages) in particular cases? To solve these needs arises IMI.

In particular, the IMI helps the competent authorities (national, regional and local) to:

  • Identify its counterpart in another Member State, using a contact data guide and a search mechanism;
  • Manage exchanges of information, including personal data, based on simple and unified procedures;
  • Overcome language barriers through the use of predefined and pre-translated task flows; and
  • Check the status of each case thanks to a monitoring mechanism.

In short, IMI enables States to cooperate more effectively on a daily basis in the implementation of internal market legislation, enabling officials, experts and competent authorities in any EMMA to locate their counterparts in another state without prior knowledge of their administrative structure and to carry out fruitful exchanges of information even if they do not share the same language.

IMI respects the regulations and supports best practices, highlighting the measures taken to ensure adequate protection of personal data within a pan-European system. Confirming this suitability, the IMI system is used for administrative cooperation between the national data protection agencies themselves and the European data protection supervisor.