COMPAS - Commission

Opinion of 4 December 2008 on a notification for prior checking regarding the "Coordination of medical, psychosocial and administrative support (COMPAS)" (Case 2008-428)

The European Commission designed a system called "Coordination of medical, psychosocial and administrative support" (COMPAS) to coordinate in a multi-disciplinary fashion the provision of help to staff in active employment. COMPAS will be a counselling facility designed to help individuals who are encountering serious health problem or serious social difficulties due to private or professional reason which interferes with their presence or performance at work. The system is based on the ad- hoc cooperation of several services within the European Commission. In principle COMPAS can only be seized for cases meeting certain criteria where all other single-service solutions and procedures have been properly tackled and exploited beforehand without success. The categories of concerned data subjects are officials and agents who are covered by the Staff Regulations and who encounter serious health problems or serious social difficulties. COMPAS will affect broad categories of personal data which will be used by the services in the interdisciplinary approach: administrative, medical and/or social data.

The EDPS analysis of the processing operations lead to a number of recommendations ensuring that the planned system will be in full compliance with Regulation 45/2001, inter alia: The COMPAS procedure should be run only with the express consent of the staff member concerned. Appropriate measures should be put in place to ensure that all working documents, not needed to be annexed to a COMPAS file, are destroyed by the persons involved from the concerned services once a case is closed. The right of access of the person concerned to his/her file also should include the right to take copies of the data related to him/her. The content of the privacy statement should be revised as to the legal basis and the categories of data recipients. COMPAS should make clear distinction related to the professional secrecy obligation of medical doctors/psychologist and any other professional involved in the COMPAS procedure. Measures should be put in place to ensure those principles.