Developing and supporting IACS and AS Digital

With the help of IACS (the Integrated Administration and Control System), the European Union (EU) wants to promote the enforcement of a uniform agricultural policy in all EU countries. EU member states are obligated to gradually implement this strategy. In particular, the aim is to digitalise and efficiently design the relevant procedures in this context. This involves a great deal of work for the federal states, whose job it is to implement this strategy at regional level. Particularly at the start of new EU funding periods, major changes are usually made to the regulations through what are known as ‘CAP reforms’, and these must be implemented on time. Meta-Level is supporting the Saarland Ministry for the Environment and Consumer Protection (MUV) in managing these tasks.

Providing the electronic application for obtaining EU agricultural funding Meta-Level’s tasks cover the entire software cycle, from packaging of farmers’ application data based on previous years and the Saarland’s reference data, to providing this data to farmers, developing the software for electronic application with the basic application (electronic form) and GIS-based land use certificate (AS Digital), and transferring completed applications to the ministry’s back-end systems.

Providing the systems for the clerks and controllers in the ministry Applications submitted by farmers have to be checked to ensure they are correct and consistent. This requires various systems that enable the clerks to perform this task. Meta-Level has developed software components for risk analysis, administrative checks and on-site inspections (IACS LUC). Also in these systems, provisioning and processing various electronic forms for implementing RAs, ACs or OSIs forms part of the functional scope.

Helping the IT administration team with developing and supporting IACS Meta-Level is supporting the system administration team with the following tasks, among others:

• General system administration tasks
• Improving reliability (switching concept)
• Automating data transfers and conversions
• Offering advice and supporting concept creation for implementing security concepts according to the specifications set out by the BSI (Federal Office for Information Security); creating documents according to the basic IT protection specifications (BSI, ISO 27001, basic IT protection manual) for preparing basic IT protection certification (ISO 27001) by the BSI