COVID-19 certainly helps take the EPO elsewhere, e.g. Skype (Microsoft) and Sword Group, and it moreover helps lay off EPO staff (downsizing long planned by the management)

Summary: The European Patent Office is outsourcing more and more of its functions to private for-profit corporations; António Campinos seems to think that the objective of the Office is nothing but rubber-stamping monopolies (as many as possible)

THE EPO was routinely outsourced to external parties under Benoît Battistelli. We gave many examples of it. It often seemed like the EPO's decision-making processes too had been outsourced, notably to litigation giants that want injunctions (embargoes), software patents in Europe and other toxic things. Remember that just before Campinos left EUIPO, an EU agency one might add, he had outsourced much of its IT work to India (quite likely in violation of EU rules, which then caused a major controversy/uproar EUIPO sought to suppress by overt censorship of critics). At the EPO he sent a lot of work to Serco [1, 2, 3]. For those who don't know why Serco is so controversial (and the EPO sought to hide this), look it up. Lots of information about their scandals all over the Web. Security? Let the Nazi firm handle that. Better to hire highly controversial bullies than to hire in-house to 'go Kapo' on EPO staff.

"Remember that just before Campinos left EUIPO, an EU agency one might add, he had outsourced much of its IT work to India (quite likely in violation of EU rules, which then caused a major controversy/unroar EUIPO sought to suppress by overt censorship of critics)."This afternoon IP Kat published this "BREAKING" post about EQE; for those who don't know, the PEB and EQE posts attracted more comments than all other posts combined in recent months (hundreds of them), mostly because PEB is a scam and the cancellation of exams caused an uproar. As for the EQE, when they discussed it I posted a comment to mention EQE misconduct (details in this series/index) and of course IP Kat deleted it; instead of covering EPO corruption, nowadays IP Kat covers it up. This wasn't the first time they did this. Today the IP Kat blogger reveals that EPO President Campinos talks about EQE but he does not address his own corruption of it (see the said scandal); instead he wants to outsource EQE to an external private company and dub it "e-EQE" or whatever. Based on their Web site, it's some Dutch company (based in Amsterdam) with proprietary software and a number of partners we barely know anything about. "Mike Williams is relatively new to the PEB governance board," IP Kat wrote, "having joined in April of this year. Mr Williams first went through the arrangements that are being made for the remote exams. The exams will take place using automatic proctoring software provided by the external provider, Proctor Exam."

The key part is this:

IPKat has just received the breaking news that the EPO plans to move the EQE online next year (many thanks to Katfriend Gwilym Roberts for sending us the news!). The information comes from the EPO president himself in the final episode of the popular "Two IPs In A Pod" podcast, in which the EPO President Campinos and CIPA’s own President Richard Mair are in conversation.

President Campinos confirms:

“We plan to move to an e-EQE next year. You hope for the best but you plan for the worst and in March next year we will probably be in the same situation as we are in presently. So I think there is no alternative but to move to an e-EQE and we are working very hard with epi to make it happen.”

IP Kat never wrote about the illegality of the EPO outsourcing proceedings to Microsoft. Nor did it mention any of the other scandals. In this particular case they blindly celebrate something whose legality is questionable for a number of reasons. Notice, based on the above, how CIPA (part of Team UPC) gets to shape the EPO's policy. This is perverse. Heck, why not let Big Banks directly control the Federal Reserve as well? Who's really running the EPO? Member states or the litigation sector? ⬆

Update: Well, this is now confirmed and as a comment put it:

as it is published on the EPO website

EQE 2021 –Important information from the Supervisory Board

The European qualifying examination (EQE) 2021 is planned tobe conducted online.

A working group composed of EPO and epi representatives has been set up to work out the arrangements fornext year's EQE. Their aim is to ensure that the examination can be conducted in an orderly manner in a safe environment and to guarantee fair conditions for all candidates. The Supervisory Board is in close contact with the working group and oversees all itstasks.

Further details will be announced at a later date, including an optionfor candidates to test the system in good time before the examination.

The EQE syllabus and the structure of the various examination papers will be as outlined in the REE and IPREEand in line with previous years' examination papers (Compendium).

For the time being, individual questions on the online examination will not be responded to directly. However, they will be collected and used as a basis for FAQs to be published at a later stage.

which can be found under

http://documents.epo.org/projects/babylon/eponot.nsf/0/a3fe9e76fa0f2964c12585ae004462ac/$FILE/Announcement%20Online%20EQE%202021.pdf

but also in German and French, since we still have three official languages https://www.epo.org/learning/eqe_de.html