The Online Access Act should ensure that most particularly relevant administrative procedures can also be completed online in Germany by the end of 2022. However, this goal seems to be a long way off.
Berlin (dpa) – The digitization of administrative services in Germany is progressing more slowly than promised. This emerges from a response from the federal government to a small question from the left-wing faction in the Bundestag.
It is therefore unlikely that services that are particularly frequently requested, as promised by the federal and state governments, can be completed online by the end of 2022. This includes administrative processes such as registering a place of residence, getting married, applying for a new identity card, registering and changing the registration of a motor vehicle or issuing a registration certificate. First, the ARD capital office reported about it.
The federal and state governments actually had five years to digitize their administrative services. The Online Access Act (OZG), which was passed by the Bundestag in August 2017, should serve this purpose. It gave the states five years to digitize all 575 administrative services and offer them online.
Since it became apparent at the beginning of 2022 that this goal could not be achieved by the end of the year, the federal and state governments agreed in May that 35 particularly relevant administrative services (“booster services”) should be available online by the end of the year. However, the current response from the federal government suggests that even this scaled-down goal cannot be achieved. The letter from the Federal Ministry of the Interior states that so far not even half of the planned 35 “booster” services for citizens have been implemented.
The digital policy spokeswoman for the left-wing faction, Anke Domscheit-Berg, accused the federal and state governments of setting the wrong priorities when it came to digitization. Applying for a firearms license is on the list of administrative services that need to be implemented with high pressure. The federal, state and local governments should instead focus on the areas that are actually relevant, such as the possibility of digitally re-registering your place of residence.
Domscheit-Berg also criticized the fact that there was no central contact point for citizens where the status of digitization could be broken down down to individual municipalities. The existing “dashboard” on the status of digitization is incorrect and incomplete.
ARD report at tagesschau.de Dashboard digitization
Source: Stern
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