[michieldotv]

As a Belgian having worked in Denmark, my access to Danish e-government services through NemID was revoked pretty soon after I left the country.

This was quite a frustrating experience. Some time after leaving the country I got e-mails saying that SKAT, the local tax authority, had documents/messages for me to read on the secure message platform eBoks.

However, try as I might, I was unable to convince anyone to restore access since I was no longer a resident. I agonized quite a bit over this since I dreaded inadvertently being a fraud.

It would have saved me a lot of grief if the Danish e-gov services would have federated with Belgian and other EU identity services.

Edit: Forgot to say this is something The Netherlands already does pretty well. Dutch e-gov services, or at least those from Belastingdienst federate with many European idenity service providers including Belgium. Great for cross border workers.

[jeroenhd]

The various authentication services are already supposed to integrate through EIDAS but I don't know how well that works yet. I'm seeing the button to use it on more and more government login pages so I think it's getting picked up more.

As far as I know, the Dutch government has been pretty slow in their EIDAS implementation, even (nearly?) missing some deadlines, maybe the Belgian government has a similar problem?

[NicoJuicy]

In Belgium, we have several different regions ( Flemish, Brussels and Wallonia)

For some integrations with Wallonia, we are currently forced to use the federal integration, since their implementation hasn't even started yet :(

You are correct about eidas, it seems to be handled by the federal government currently, but there's not much documentation on it ( Belgium) and i have seen some applications integrating that way. So i suppose the issue is documentation and discoverability.

And the partial conflict of interest with itsme

[jeroenhd]

Belgium with its four governments is quite a weird edge case on many aspects of international standardisation. I don't don't much about the Belgian systems other than that there are several, but theoretical Belgium could make four systems work separately to authenticate abroad with the right federal setup.

Like is the case with my own government, I don't have very great expectations of Belgium's federal government and their IT projects. I'd wish countries could just share their implementations with other governments. Hell, I believe any code developed with public money should be open source for the benefit of everyone, but governments aren't a fan of that because companies charge more for developing software in the open.

[NicoJuicy]

Some source code of the Flemish government can be found on GitHub fyi

[wdb]

Problem with e-gov services is actually getting your DigiD account. I have been trying for many years without luck and still don't have it