Process description and steps

The general concepts of the Grant Management Services system also apply to the outbound formal notification process. For a detailed description of the roles mentioned in this process, see the Roles and access rights. 

The EU announces its formal position in an EU position letter. The COCO or PACO (and, optionally the PLSIGN, the PFSIGN, the LEAR and the AUCO) are notified via a Formal Notification and a PNS of the sending of this letter.

The beneficiary has 30 days from the acknowledgement of the EU position letter to upload and send its observations or close the process without submitting any observations.

Steps 

Step 1: The coordinator uploads observations to the EU position letter

If you need to consult the EU position letter, you can find it stored under Process Documents and it can be accessed and downloaded from there. To download the letter, click the link and then the download icon :

To upload the observations document, click on the Upload button:

Then click Add new attachment to attach the document:

To remove the attached document, you just need to click on the "X". 

Once the uploading is finished, click OK:

After uploading the observations, click Submit to EU to send them to the EU. A notification will be sent to the Commission to inform that the observations have been submitted:

If the Observations document has been successfully submitted, the corresponding action is not available anymore and the process will be completed. The submitted Observations document will be added to the Process documents section:

Step 2: The coordinator agrees with the content of the EU position letter and closes the process without observations

If you agree with the content of the EU position letter, complete the process without sending any observations. For this, you need to click the Close without Observations button:

If you select this option a warning message will be displayed:

Click OK to confirm or Cancel if you wish to go back and upload observations.

After the observations have been submitted or the process has been closed without observations, the EU will state its final position via a Formal Notification containing the "EU final position letter".

 If the EU requests additional information, a Participant Notification (PNS) will be sent to inform the beneficiary that a new EU position letter is sent as reply to any additional issues related to the previous EU position letter. In this case, the beneficiary will be able to upload observations to the new letter. To do so, the Coordinator will have to follow the actions described above.