Obligations of the register

The Once-Only Technical System (OOTS) is a system for exchanging register data between authorities in EU countries. 

When a Finnish person or company wishes to initiate transactions in another EU Member State as part of one of the procedures under the SDG Regulation, the authority in the other Member State must provide the Finnish person with an opportunity to request the Finnish register data (evidence) required for the transactions using OOTS. In turn, the registers of Finnish authorities are obliged to disclose this information through OOTS. The authorities of other Member States may ask the Finnish authorities for the information they need according to national or EU law in procedures under the SDG Regulation. More detailed provisions on the exchange of information through OOTS are laid down in the SDG Regulation and the OOTS Technical Implementing Regulation.

The KEHA Centre has implemented a centralised national OOTS data transmission service, which enables Finnish authorities to disclose information from their registers via OOTS to authorities in other Member States at the lowest possible cost. Provisions on the role of the KEHA Centre in the transmission of OOTS data are laid down in the Act on the KEHA Centre.

Data transmission service


By decision of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment and supported by other ministries, the KEHA Centre has been selected to implement Finland’s centralised data transmission service for OOTS.

The service: 

  1. forwards requests for information from authorities in other EU Member States to the relevant registers (items 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 in the figure)
  2. retrieves the information required by an authority in another country from the interface of the authority’s register (item 6 in the figure)
  3. transmits the information to the authority of another Member State, either in a machine-exportable structured format or as a PDF file. (Items 9, 10 & 11 in the figure)

Before the final transmission of the information to another Member State, the user must check and approve the disclosure of the information in the Data Preview Finland service implemented by the KEHA Centre. (Items 7 & 8 in the figure)

The purposes of the data transmission service are to ease the burden on the authorities in providing the information and to reduce the costs of the SDG Regulation for the public administration as a whole. The authorities are not obliged to use the service, but they are obliged to disclose the information required in the procedures defined in the SDG Regulation to the authorities of other Member States through OOTS in one way or another – either using the KEHA Centre service or through their own technical solution.

In accordance with the Act on the KEHA Centre (743/2024), one of its tasks is to act as the controller of the national technical system related to the exchange of information in OOTS referred to in the SDG Regulation. The KEHA Centre receives and further discloses information in OOTS from the competent authorities referred to in the SDG Regulation only for the purposes specified in the SDG Regulation and taking into account the restrictions laid down therein. The role of the KEHA Centre in the disclosure of information is covered in more detail in the Government Proposal to Parliament HE 93/2024 vp.

When an authority uses the KEHA Centre’s data transmission service, the authority first discloses the information to the KEHA Centre, which further discloses the information to the authority in another Member State, according to the request made by the authority in question to the KEHA Centre. The KEHA Centre acts as the controller of the data to be disclosed only at the moment when the KEHA Centre’s data transmission service retrieves the information from the register and the user previews it and either approves or rejects its use in the Data Preview Finland service. Once the information has been transmitted to the requesting authority (or the user has decided not to use the it), the KEHA Centre deletes the information from its system.

As a rule, the KEHA Centre does not alter the content of the data disclosed from the register. The authority maintaining the register is responsible for the content and accuracy of the data to be disclosed.

However, the KEHA Centre may convert the disclosed data into a human-readable PDF format and filter the data to correspond to requests for information from authorities in other EU Member States so that only the information they request is disclosed to them. 

The SDG Regulation enables the data to be transmitted in accordance with the common data models agreed upon by the EU Member States in the coordination meetings of the SDG Regulation. If the data disclosed by the register is to be converted into a common data model, the KEHA Centre will agree on the details of the conversion in more detail with the register authority.

Under the SDG Regulation, the authorities are obliged to use OOTS to disclose the information required in the procedures defined in Annex II to the Regulation and its extensions from their registers to the authorities of other EU Member States.

The KEHA Centre provides the authorities with a free-of-charge data transmission service so that the authorities can fulfil their obligations under the SDG Regulation. The service enables the authorities to disclose information via OOTS to authorities in other Member States at the lowest possible cost. The KEHA Centre is fully responsible for the costs of developing and maintaining the data transmission service.

Because the service is free, no fees may be charged from the KEHA Centre for the disclosed information and the use of the register’s technical interface. If an authority cannot disclose the information to the KEHA Centre free of charge, the authority must disclose the information requested from it to the OOTS system using its own technical solution, and it is liable for the development and maintenance costs of such a solution.

The KEHA Centre has not implemented a functionality for paying for the disclosure of information in the data transmission service, as the user cannot download the information for themselves – they can only check the information to be disclosed in the Data Preview Finland service. In other words, the requested information is not disclosed to the user but directly to the authority of another Member State via the data transmission service.