A draft law by the government coalition on the digitization of administration has drawn sharp criticism from business associations in Germany: Above all, there is a lack of an overall concept encompassing all administrative levels – for example in the sense of a master plan. This is set out in a key issues paper by four large business associations, which is available to the ARD capital studio and reports on tagesschau.de.
No priorities, no deadlines
In the key issues paper, the associations are particularly bothered by the fact that the most important administrative services for companies were determined several years ago – nevertheless, the federal government continues to rely on answering “central digitization questions only in the course of the implementation process”, quotes tagesschau.de from the document. The draft law has not even defined the priorities. After 5 years of implementation of the original Online Access Act (OZG), the legislator is not in a position to name clear priority areas in the law itself – this seems incomprehensible, the text says.
The key issues paper comes from the Federation of German Employers’ Associations, the Federal Association of German Industry, the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce and the Central Association of German Skilled Trades. They emphasize that a well-functioning administration in Germany is equally important for the citizens and the economy. And business, with many contacts with the authorities, is the administration’s biggest “customer”. A digital administration is an important location factor, here Germany is lagging behind in a European comparison.
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First attempt failed – “OZG 2.0” also criticized
Actually, with the OZG, which came into force in 2017, a large part of the administrative processes should be digitized within 5 years. By the end of the period in October last year, however, the federal and state governments had not even come close to achieving this goal – only a fraction of the administrative services were available nationwide at the time. Even then, leading organizations of the German economy complained about the sluggish digitization of the administration. The Federal Cabinet intends to adopt a new “OZG 2.0” soon.
Among other things, the trade associations criticize the lack of bureaucracy reduction in the innovations of the second OZG. Digitization offers a lot of potential to improve inefficient administrative processes – but this does not happen “automatically” through digitization, but requires further efforts. The key issues paper also criticizes the omission of any deadlines in the new legislative proposal: This means that there is no incentive to accelerate implementation, after all, the digitization of the administration is a “permanent task”, according to the document.
(tiw)
