Article 16(1) of Regulation (EC) No 1071/2009 requires the Member States to keep a national electronic register of road transport undertakings that have been authorised by a competent authority to engage in the occupation of road transport operator.

Article 16(5) and (6) of Regulation (EC) No 1071/2009 provide for all the national electronic registers to be interconnected by 31 December 2012, and mandate the Commission to adopt common rules concerning such interconnection.

The Commission adopted Regulation (EU) No 1213/2010, in order to make possible the interconnection of the national electronic registers requested by Regulation (EC) No 1071/2009, through an electronic message exchange system called ERRU (European Registers of Road Transport Undertakings).

Regulation (EU) No 1213/2010 has been repealed by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2016/480 in order to set up an enhanced version of ERRU by 30 January 2019.

ERRU consists of two parallel architectures regarding the exchange of messages between Member States. The first one is based on a central hub managed by the Commission. This central hub centralises the data traffic by collecting the messages sent by Member States and forwarding them subsequently to the Member States to which the messages are addressed. Alternatively, Member States may choose to use a compatible commercial network to exchange messages directly amongst themselves (peer-to-peer configuration), without those messages going through the central hub.

Given that messages exchanged directly between Member States are not routed through the central hub, eventual system faults related to those messages go unnoticed to the Commission; the Commission is therefore unable to fulfil its role as general manager of ERRU by taking the corresponding corrective action, which consequently jeopardizes the good performance of the whole system.

The peer-to-peer configuration does not allow the Commission to have timely access to information on the volume and characteristics of the messages exchanged; it is not possible therefore for the Commission to have an overall view on the usage of ERRU, information that is useful for future improvements of the system.

The problems encountered with the peer-to-peer configuration make it necessary to ensure that all messages exchanged in the framework of ERRU are routed through the central hub, and thus remove this possibility from the scope of Implementing Regulation (EU) 2016/480.

Furthermore, some minor additions and changes in Implementing Regulation (EU) 2016/480 have to be made in order to address the following aspects in a more precise and clearer manner: the procedure for connection to ERRU, the tests to be performed and the consequences of failure, the content of some XML messages, the definition of the escalation procedure to be followed by Member States in case of system errors, and the time that personal data can be retained in the logs of the central hub. Consequently, Implementing Regulation (EU) 2016/480 should be amended accordingly.

The measures provided for in this Regulation are adopted in accordance with the advisory procedure set out in Article 4 of Regulation (EU) No 182/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council,