CHAPTER 2 FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES IN RELATION TO IMI

Article 6 IMI actors and users
1. The following shall be IMI actors:
(a) competent authorities of the Member States pursuant to Article 7;
(b) coordinators pursuant to Article 8;
(c) the Commission.
2. Only natural persons working under the control of a competent authority or that of a coordinator, hereinafter ‘IMI users’, may use IMI pursuant to Article 9.

Article 7 Competent authorities
The competent authorities shall, for the purposes defined in the relevant Community act on the basis of which information is to be exchanged, ensure the exchange within IMI of the information concerned.

Article 8 IMI coordinators
1. Each Member State shall appoint one national IMI coordinator to ensure that IMI is implemented at national level.
Each Member State may additionally appoint one or more delegated IMI coordinators according to its internal administrative structure in order to carry out the coordination responsibilities for a particular legislative area, a division of the administration or a geographical region.
2. The Commission shall register the national IMI coordinators in IMI and shall grant access to IMI to them.
3. If a Member State appoints a delegated IMI coordinator pursuant to paragraph 1, the national IMI coordinator shall register the delegated IMI coordinator in IMI and shall grant access to IMI to it.
4. The coordinators shall register or authenticate registration of competent authorities requiring access to IMI and ensure its efficient functioning. They shall grant access to competent authorities to those legislative areas for which they are competent.
5. All coordinators may act as competent authorities. In such cases a coordinator will exercise the same access rights as a competent authority.

Article 9 IMI user roles
1. The IMI users may carry out one or more of the following roles: request handlers, allocators, referral handlers and local data administrators.
2. Each IMI user shall be granted a defined set of access rights associated with their user role as set out in Article 12.
3. All IMI users may search for a specific competent authority.
4. IMI users designated as request handlers may participate in information exchanges on behalf of their competent authority.
5. IMI users designated as allocators in a competent authority may attribute an information request to one or more request handlers within that authority.
IMI users designated as allocators in a coordinator may attribute an information request to one or more referral handlers within that authority.
6. IMI users in a coordinator may be designated as referral handlers.
They may approve sending requests or responses by a competent authority where such an approval process has been indicated as a requirement by the coordinator and may indicate agreement or disagreement when a requesting competent authority is not satisfied with a response received.
7. IMI users designated as local data administrators may do any of the following:
(a) update personal data about IMI users of their own authority;
(b) register additional users for their own authority;
(c) change user profiles for users of their own authority.

Article 10 Commission
1. The Commission shall ensure the availability and the maintenance of the IT infrastructure on which IMI will be run. It shall provide a multilingual system which functions in all official languages as well as a central help-desk to assist Member States in the use of IMI.
2. The Commission will make publicly available the sets of questions and data fields referred to in Article 2(2).
3. The Commission may participate in information exchanges only in specific cases where the relevant Community act provides for information to be exchanged between Member States and the Commission.
4. In the cases referred to in the third paragraph, the Commission shall exercise the same access rights as a competent authority pursuant to Article 12.