The Agency has developed a Comment Response Tool (CRT) that is used to automate the consultation process for Notices of Proposed Amendments (NPA). The CRT allows users to review NPAs and place their comments.

It may be requested to have the executive summary of the NPAs translated by sending an email to RPS within three weeks from the publication of the NPA. This request has to be motivated and is subject to availability of budget resources. The translation process may take from 4 to 6 weeks.

A Member State can request - not later than two weeks prior the expiring of the consultation deadline - an extension of the consultation period for translating the NPA at its own expenses. Such an extension may not exceed the time of 1 month in order to avoid delays in the rulemaking process.

All comments should be placed using the CRT. In case the use of CRT is prevented by technical problems these should be reported to the webmaster and comments sent by email instead.

Registration is required to place comments. All registered users have the possibility to receive notifications whenever a new NPA is published.

Once a comment is saved it is allocated a unique number which confirms the comment was successfully saved. While the consultation is open the users can still modify their comments. A detailed User Guide is provided to help new users become familiar with the CRT.

Technical details

The CRT is a web-based application. It has been successfully tested and is supported on Internet Explorer 6+ (on Windows XP, SP2 must be installed) and Firefox.
It has been successfully tested on Opera 9.x, Safari 3.x and Google Chrome, but those browsers cannot be considered as supported.
Documents in the CRT will be provided in two formats; Acrobat (.pdf) and FlashPaper (.swf). The required programs, Adobe Reader and Adobe FlashPlayer, are available for free download, see links below.