Internal Market Information System

The Internal Market Information System (Internal Market Information System, IMI) is an IT-based network for information exchange between public authorities in the European Economic Area. It has been developed by the European Commission together with the Member States of the European Union to facilitate administrative cooperation across borders and to accelerate. IMI allows public administrations at local, regional and national level to make their contacts for another country identifying and exchanging information with them in their own language. This is achieved using pre-translated standard questions and responses, and by machine translation.

For example, if a French authority shall verify the diploma of a Finnish nurse who wants to work in France, the authority to identify the competent Finnish authority of all registered in IMI authorities. Then selects the question that they would like to ask, from a catalog of pre-translated questions and sent them through IMI. The Finnish authority sees the question and the corresponding answer options in Finnish. The answer is the French authority in turn displayed in French.

The development of the IMI was funded under the IDABC program.

The IMI is designed as a flexible system that can be used for many areas of the internal market. It is currently applied in all Member States of the European Economic Area for administrative cooperation under the Directive on the recognition of professional qualifications ( 2005/36/EC) and under the Services Directive (2006/123/EC ). The IMI is currently being extended to other areas of law.

The European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, Michel Barnier, has expressed the view that the IMI could develop into a " Facebook for the internal market ".