Once only, ANPR and PDND: the principle is 58 years old. The news is the infrastructure.

From 1 July 2026, public administrations and public service operators can automatically acquire citizens’ registry data directly from ANPR, the National Registry of the Resident Population, for the performance of their institutional activities. The channel is the National Digital Data Platform (PDND), the interoperability system enabling the secure, standardised exchange of information between public bodies. The legal basis is Art. 62(3-bis), Legislative Decree 82/2005 — the Italian Digital Administration Code.

For citizens, the promise is concrete: no more requests for the same certificates at different counters. It is the European once-only principle — data is provided to the administration a single time, and administrations exchange it among themselves — moving from paper to automated execution.

The Department for Digital Transformation speaks of a revolution. Understandably so: on the operational level, it is one. But on the legal level it pays to be precise, because the history of this principle in Italian law is long — and instructive.

The real news is not the legal principle: it is the availability, for the first time, of a national infrastructure enabling its concrete, automated, large-scale application.

A principle the law has known since 1968

The idea that citizens should not act as couriers between one administration and another was not born today, nor with the European digital agenda. It was born almost sixty years ago, and since then the legislator has reaffirmed it — with growing intensity — at least three times.

Why it has not worked so far

If the legal framework was so clear — and from 2012 even backed by sanctions — why did citizens keep collecting certificates for years? The answer lies not in the law, but in its execution. The rules of 1968, 1990 and 2011 were applied in a partial, bureaucratic way, with chronic delays: in substance, many administrations kept asking for certificates, in open conflict with obligations that had been in force for decades.

The knot was structural: absent true interoperability between public databases — historically fragmented, sadly marked by inaccuracies and duplications — ex officio acquisition remained a manual, slow, often impracticable burden. The legal obligation was there; the technical means were not. And an obligation without means tends to degrade into evasive practice.

The general opening of ANPR via PDND is, in this sense, a necessary manoeuvre to break a festering deadlock: it does not introduce a new citizens' right, but removes — at least in theory — the technical alibi that for decades prevented its effective exercise.

Governance and accountability: what stays with the entities

The new arrangement does not centralise data ownership. On the contrary: ownership of documents and data remains with the individual administrations feeding the platform, while the Ministry of the Interior monitors access to ANPR services used via PDND and, more generally, the correct population of the registry database.

This means that responsibility for the processing carried out and for data quality stays with the individual entities involved. Interoperability is not a delegation of responsibility: it is a multiplier. An inaccurate record that once stayed confined to a municipal archive can now propagate automatically, in real time, to every entity that queries it. The stakes of data quality grow in the same measure as circulation grows.

These are the facts

The “revolution” of 1 July is not a legal one: Italian law has prohibited administrations from requesting certificates that other administrations already hold for fourteen years, and has preached self-certification for fifty-eight. The revolution — if it turns out to be one — is infrastructural: for the first time there is a national platform that makes technically possible, at scale and in an automated way, what the law had been demanding in vain for decades.

The hardest work remains — the work no platform does on its own: ensuring data accuracy, consistent population of the databases, security of the flows and protection of personal data. Because interoperability distributes information — but responsibilities stay exactly where they were.

This article is for informational and educational purposes and does not constitute legal advice, nor does it replace professional consultancy calibrated to the specific case. The positions expressed reflect Tomato Blue RegTech's analysis. © 2026 Tomato Blue.