On June 30th and July 1st 2026, SME Connect organised its Summit in Brussels on “One-Person Companies and the Self-Employed in Europe: Working Together, Calling for Recognition”. Representing EAR-AER, our board member Louis Delcart attended multiple workshops on its behalf. He engaged in two specific sessions alongside SME representatives and OPC delegates, whose participation largely hailed from Germany and Austria.
On Wednesday, he attended a Working Group Entrepreneurship, Self-Employment and One-Person Companies, chaired by the Bulgarian EESC envoy Prof. Milena Angelova, who focused on the institutional SME perspective and how EU rules can become simpler, more workable and more predictable for small businesses. The several speakers emphasised the reduction of the administrative burden, better regulation, SME competitiveness and the practical implementation of EU policy from the perspective of entrepreneurs and SME representatives.
Important during this entire session was to get acquainted by the vocabulary installed over the years by the European administration and of which we try to give you hereby an overview:
A One Person Company (OPC) is a corporate business structure that allows a single individual to act as both the sole shareholder and director. It combines the complete control of a traditional sole proprietorship with the legal protections and credibility of a registered private limited company. We are talking here not only about people working in the ICT and AI context, but also about translators, opera singers, manufacturers, shopkeepers, etc.
The 2026 EU Single Market Strategy, anchored by the One Europe, One Market roadmap signed by the European Commission and Council, is an initiative to remove cross-border trade barriers and boost Europe’s global competitiveness by the end of 2027. It shifts focus from creating new laws to cutting red tape, harmonizing rules, and digitizing operations.
Key focus areas include:
- The “EU Inc.” Framework: A new “28th regime” for company law that allows businesses to operate seamlessly across borders using a single legal identity.
- The European Business Wallet: A digital system enforcing the “once-only” principle, so businesses do not have to repeatedly submit the same documents or credentials to multiple member states.
- Posting of Workers: E-declarations to significantly simplify the administrative hurdles of temporarily deploying staff across EU countries.
- Mutual Recognition: A renewed push to ensure that goods and professional skills legally recognized in one member state are accepted without friction across the entire bloc.
- The European Product Act: Targeting fragmented product packaging and labeling rules to reduce compliance costs, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Although fundamentally all initiatives to create a single market are applauded, the specific category of the OPCs, representing a huge percentage of the entire SME market, which in turn is good for 99,8% of all companies in Europe, fear that all those rules will be a serious burden for them for many reasons. According to an international study, micro-enterprises in Germany spend around nine percent of their working time on pure administration. That’s the highest figure of all company sizes. Those without their own legal department bear the heaviest burden. There are practical barriers faced by self-employed professionals, one-person companies and mobile entrepreneurs when operating across borders. This includes recognition of qualifications, administrative procedures, temporary cross-border service provision, legal certainty, fragmented compliance requirements and the question is to know whether simplified EU-level instruments such as EU Inc. or a 28th Regime could help reduce friction for mobile business structures.
In several cases of new regulation that is considered, OPCs see an additional burden rather than an advantage. There is the Market Surveillance Regulation revision and the Omnibus VI simplification package and there is the impact of EU product regulation, conformity requirements, labelling, CE marking, safety obligations and compliance costs on small entrepreneurial structures.
- The Omnibus VI Simplification Agenda (also known as the Chemicals Omnibus) is a European Union legislative package designed to drastically reduce administrative burdens for the chemical sector, cosmetics industry, and fertilizer producers. Initially presented by the European Commission in July 2025 as part of a broader competitiveness plan, the European Council and the European Parliament reached a final political agreement on its implementation in June 2026.
- The upcoming revision of the Market Surveillance Regulation (MSR – Regulation (EU) 2019/1020) is part of a major legislative overhaul to modernize the EU internal market for non-food products. The European Commission plans to present the legislative proposal for this revision in Q3 2026 as a core component of the upcoming European Product Act.
- The European Digital Identity (EUDI) framework is a legal and technical standard that allows all EU citizens, residents, and businesses to securely prove their identity digitally. Governed by the revised eIDAS 2 Regulation, it mandates that all EU Member States must provide at least one EUDI Wallet app to their citizens by December 2026.
The practical relevance of digital identity, wallet-based services and browser consent rules is questioned when it comes to self-employed professionals, small businesses and one-person companies.
During a Working Breakfast “More Visibility, Better Legislation: A European Call for One-Person Companies and the Self-Employed” organised in the premises of the MEP Salon in the Spinelli and co-chaired by the Polish MEP Angelika Winzig and the Italian MEP Maria Grapini, that took place in the premises of the European Economic & Social Committee (EESC).
Building of the European Parliament, more than 50 OPC owners and SME organisation representatives emphasised on the 66 new European rules are becoming a burden for OPCs. There is hardly any lobby for sole proprietors and small businesses in Europe. Even the definition of who qualifies isn’t consistent across national borders. This is considered more than just a bureaucratic detail, because rules are made for those who are physically present. And OPCs are rarely there. They insist on joining forces on a representation level so that their voice can be heard in the lobbying context.
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