Development
Standards for administrative digitalization take years
The town hall of the unified community of Tangerhütte. The digital town hall is already a reality here today. photo
© Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert/dpa
Administrative digitalization cannot function without standards. However, they often do not exist or are non-binding. That’s why there is still so much faxing and stamping in the offices.
Anke Domscheit-Berg, the digital policy spokeswoman for the Left in the Bundestag, criticized the pace of implementing administrative digitalization. “It is completely unclear to me how it was possible to take so long to develop a standard for purchasing cloud services,” she told the German Press Agency. The implementation period for the standard for the building application is also “simply too long” at 24 months. Especially when it comes to building applications, there are many people involved who have to exchange information and documents with each other, said Domscheit-Berg. Here, uniform data formats could save a lot of processing time.
Failures in politics
However, not only the incumbent traffic light coalition is responsible for the slow development, but also the previous government. “The grand coalition has completely trashed the issue,” said the MP. The first online access law in 2017 failed to set binding requirements for standards. The process for developing the standards via the IT Planning Council proved to be “completely inefficient”, also because the committee only met three times a year.
According to the Interior Ministry, only three regulations have been passed since the traffic light coalition took office, including the important standard for payment services. Since November, the procedure has been regulated as to how payments to the state, such as fees for a passport or dog registration, can also be made online using common payment services. “There is finally a standard for this. Now it just needs to be binding and used by all authorities,” said Domscheit-Berg.