The Federal Government is making an attempt at the Online Access Act in order to advance the digitization of the administration. In addition, a citizen account should ensure that state aid can be transferred directly. Does the law keep its promises?
Whether climate and anti-inflation vouchers in Austria, energy checks to reduce high electricity costs in France or social bonus subsidies for heating costs in Italy. The energy price crisis in the wake of the Ukraine war has shown what other European neighbors have been able to do for a long time, but which Germany was previously unable to do: relieve households with direct and targeted transfers.
None of the existing transfer offices – not the tax offices, family benefits offices or health insurance companies – record all residents. Nowhere are bank details, income data or even addresses stored centrally. The linking of the scattered information always failed due to political will, legal hurdles and the inadequate digitization of the German administration.
Online Access Act is intended to digitize official offices
If the federal government now makes a second central attempt to digitize German offices, a direct effect of this can also be that this path will be opened up in the future. According to the Online Access Act 2.0 (OZG 2.0), which has now been passed in the cabinet, all citizens can identify themselves online with a digital citizen account. This gives the state the opportunity to transfer financial aid directly to those affected – possibly also soon the “climate money” propagated by the Greens in the traffic light coalition.
In any case, the federal government has decided to impose a uniform federal ID on the federal, state and local authorities for their digital services. A kind of large-scale test was carried out by around 3.5 million students who, due to the lack of central registration, did not receive the promised energy savings. The applications for the payment of 200 euros per person are made via the specially set up platform, with the help of the Bund-ID – which, only due to a lack of broad application options, led an existence virtually closed to the public.
That should change. Throughout Germany, the ID can be used by private users via the citizen account to digitally extend their ID card or to register and re-register a motor vehicle. Only two of 15 services that, according to Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, should be offered nationwide by 2024 at the latest. These – and more than 500 other services – were already digitization goals of the Online Access Act five years ago. But the federal, state and local governments got tangled up in the chaos of jurisdiction and competed over who was allowed to set standards. Objections from privacy advocates also slowed down the reform.
Central Portal
The OZG 2.0 now supplements the first law and is intended to accelerate implementation above all via the central portal: a digital mailbox that citizens can use to communicate with the administration, submit attachments to specialist authorities or receive notifications. The Elster certificate, which was developed for electronic tax returns, should play a central role, as should the eleven-digit tax ID. However, it can only be used for identification for some applications, such as for the energy price flat rate.
What else is important, Capital summarizes here:
- 15 particularly important services: The federal, state and local governments want to focus directly on 15 particularly important services. “By 2024 at the latest, for example, it will be possible to apply for a vehicle or driving license registration, re-registration, marriage, a building permit and parental allowance digitally throughout Germany. This is a great benefit for the citizens – and a milestone on the way to the digital state.” , said Minister Faeser.
What she fails to mention: Most of the services mentioned do not require the cooperation of different authorities – such as the family benefits office and the tax office for child benefit. Where child benefit can already be applied for electronically, for example in Hamburg, exceptions have been approved. In order for such previously non-communicating tubes to be able to cooperate as standard for citizen services, the register law must be modernized at the same time. - Criticism from the economy: Industry, trade and craft associations as well as employers miss a comprehensive overall concept with clear focal points that includes all administrative levels – in the sense of a master plan. In order for digitization to exploit the potential to improve inefficient administrative processes, processes must also be made less bureaucratic. Without setting deadlines, there would also be no incentive to accelerate implementation. However, a deadline has been set for companies: In a “digital only” regulation, they are obliged to use the “organizational account for companies” consistently within five years.
In addition, the associations point the finger at “previously cumbersome and inefficient coordination structures”: In order to make decisions about digital services more quickly and to scale them nationwide, a “statutory overall control from a single source” is considered urgently necessary. In other words, the federal government would have to assert itself with more than “just” the uniform entrance portal for citizen and organization accounts. - Are deadlines overrated? In fact, the innovation dispenses with new deadlines or an “after-deadline”, as it is called. This can be a lesson from the fact that previous time targets have failed miserably to the chagrin of the citizens. Instead, the modernization of administration and electronic access to services is now described as an ongoing task for the federal, state and local governments. That sounds trivial, but it isn’t: the implementation should therefore be continuously evaluated. The waiver of deadlines had been criticized by the opposition parties and by representatives of the Greens and the FDP.
- Digital economy senses deceptive packaging: The new draft law was met with fierce criticism in the digital economy. With the changes now planned, the federal government is missing the opportunity to really consistently advance the digitization of administration, said the President of the Bitkom industry association, Achim Berg. “The present draft law is not an OZG 2.0, but at most an OZG 1.1.” The federal government wants to give itself another five years before its own administrative services can be processed digitally.
- Making a whole out of fragments: The OZG 2.0 is a farewell to the previous line that 17 federal states operate their own user or citizen accounts and mailboxes in parallel. If the federal government now provides central basic services, it will replace state-owned developments – which Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg, for example, have had for some time. The federal states with their own ID accounts now have three years to say goodbye to their solutions for the conversion to the nationwide uniform federal ID. Berlin, Brandenburg, Hesse, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony-Anhalt have announced that they will replace state-owned service accounts with the Bund ID. There have been uniform organizational accounts for the corporate division since 2020.
Calendar, to-do lists, secure chats
Use these tools to organize your family
- Written form falls: Instead of electronic “access” – i.e. filling out forms on an online platform – the second attempt places greater value on actual digital processes in the offices. For this, the written form requirement – i.e. the need for a manual signature, for example for documentary documents – had to give way. It is now to be simply and uniformly replaced electronically. A secure procedure for identification and authentication in the organizational account will in future be used to digitally apply for services using the online function of the ID card. “A manual signature is no longer necessary,” promised Faeser.
- Once only principle enforced: Superfluous paperwork is also to be finally abolished by the legal anchoring of the so-called once-only principle: according to this principle, evidence to be submitted for an application – for example a birth certificate – only has to be submitted once (once only). With the consent of the applicant, they may then be retrieved electronically from other competent authorities and registers. For a long time, data protection concerns had prevented separate tubes from different offices from being allowed to communicate in this way.
- Help for overwhelmed municipalities: A core goal of digitization is to relieve administrations, which are suffering from a shortage of staff at all levels – too few young people, too many people entering retirement. In order to relieve the municipalities in particular, the new law makes the federal states more obligated than before to support the municipalities: they should create the technical and organizational prerequisites so that municipalities can connect to state portals – and thus to the portal network.
- Braked scaling: In the previous OZG efforts, the more than 500 administrative services to be digitized were primarily distributed to different federal states for development. Hamburg began to change the child benefit, Bremen the parental benefit, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania the building application, etc. The online process should be designed in such a way that other federal states can use it: by so-called one-for-all application assistants (EfA). These components, outlined in the innovation as “online services”, should now also be easier to transfer across countries in terms of data protection law.
- Criticism from the Civil Service Association: Last but not least, the German Association of Civil Servants has expressed doubts about the enforceability of the change in strategy. It remains to be seen to what extent the new strategy of the law will work, forcing the federal, state and local authorities to use the uniform federal ID for their digital offers, explained DBB boss Ulrich Silberbach. “The uniform approach is correct, but the federal ID account must finally get out of its shadowy existence.”
Student representatives, on the other hand, did not consider the new entrance ticket to the administration to be either low-threshold or data protection-friendly. Rather, new hurdles would be installed, according to the student association regarding the solution for the energy flat rate. The students are “forced” to register with the federal ID, which is “anything but data-saving and unbureaucratic”.
Source: Stern
