  The driving terms in three-body theories of elastic and inelastic scattering
of a charged particle off a bound state of two other charged particles contain
the fully off-shell two-body Coulomb T-matrix describing the intermediate-state
Coulomb scattering of the projectile with each of the charged target particles.
Up to now the latter is usually replaced by the Coulomb potential, either when
using the multiple-scattering approach or when solving three-body integral
equations. General properties of the exact and the approximate on-shell driving
terms are discussed, and the accuracy of this approximation is investigated
numerically, both for atomic and nuclear processes including bound-state
excitation, for energies below and above the corresponding three-body
dissociation threshold, over the whole range of scattering angles.
