Surveillance in the supply chain?
The administrations of EU countries are getting ready more and more quickly for digital supply chains that cover the entire public administration system and the economy. A draft amendment to the e-government act has just been adopted by the Polish government.
However, as the representatives of the Polish Chamber of Forwarding and Logistics warn, the changes to the act enable surveillance of Polish entrepreneurs and hit the domestic transport and logistics industry. Representatives of the Chamber sent a letter to the Polish Parliament’s Committee on Digitalisation on this issue.
We should add, by the way, that similar arguments relating to the possibility of data leakage are also being exchanged by supply chain experts in relation to electronic consignment notes. Currently, the European Commission, in cooperation with the IRU – the International Road Transport Union – is working on clarifying these regulations. In the case of the aforementioned e-administration law, the majority of data from companies is to be transferred to the Polish Administrative Supervision Agency (PANA). This will put in the hands of the state data concerning company secrets, audit findings, etc.
– These are extremely important and sensitive materials for entrepreneurs, as they contain information covered by trade, banking or other public trust secrets, know-how, contractor and customer data, strategies, plans, patent information and risk analyses. These are data that often provide a complete picture of a company and its deepest secrets. In such a form, the e-government act could potentially become a law on e-invigilation of Polish business, comments Marek Tarczyński, Chairman of the PISiL Council.
The government draft law also imposes on entrepreneurs the obligation to translate all transmitted documentation: contracts, invoices, etc., into Polish. Until now, this obligation concerned only documents needed by a supervisory institution, e.g. in the course of an inspection. However, the new e-government law imposes the obligation to translate all documentation, which, according to PISiL, does not follow from the Polish language law.
🟢 You can read about other supply chain challenges in the report Supply Chain Digitalisation: opportunity or necessity?
