It is intended to be a new attempt in the fight against mountains of paper. However, the goal is still far from being achieved. On Friday, the Bundestag approved Marco Buschmann’s Bureaucracy Relief Act advise. The Federal Minister of Justice wants to free Germany from excessive regulations. “Citizens, companies and even authorities are so exhausted by more and more laws and regulations that they can worry less and less about innovation, digitalization and other important issues,” said the FDP politician at the first reading of the law to reduce bureaucracy.
The plan is to relieve companies in Germany of more than one billion euros. This is the estimated value for time and effort that will be eliminated if unnecessary regulations are removed in administration and companies. However, the fourth bureaucracy relief law, for which Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) is also responsible, should not be imagined as a radical purification program. The concrete consequences remain manageable.
“More of a mess than a real liberation”
What should change, for example, is that all guests no longer have to fill out a piece of paper with their personal details when checking into the hotel. Buschmann’s house calculated that almost three million hours of filling out forms could be eliminated each year. In the Bundestag on Friday it was CDU MP Martin Plum who put a certain damper on the enthusiasm about such figures. Because only people with German citizenship are exempt from the registration form requirement in hotels. So it remains the case that passports have to be checked first. “For many German guests, nothing changes at all, because wherever beds, taxes or tourist taxes are charged, they also have to provide further data,” said Plum. “All of this is more of a big mess than a real liberation.”
Justice Minister Buschmann naturally sees things differently. His law is aimed at “bureaucratic burnout” and the dismantling of unnecessary regulations is an “economic stimulus program at no cost.” For example, the plan is to shorten the retention periods for accounting documents, i.e. invoices for tax returns or payrolls in companies, from ten to eight years. According to Buschmann, relief volume: around 625 million euros. Many “written form requirements” no longer fit into the digital age, such as the obligation to conclude employment contracts on paper. This is now being abolished in some industries.
Buschmann wants to continue his campaign in Brussels
Here too, objections were heard in the Bundestag. The CDU complained that in the hotel industry, trade fair construction, freight forwarding companies or in the hospitality and forestry industries, employment contracts will remain on paper in the future. Why so much distrust? The Union called for digital employment contracts for everyone two years ago. AfD MP Stephan Brandner criticized Buschmann’s plans as ineffective. In a survey of associations, 442 measures to reduce bureaucracy were suggested, but “only a tiny fraction” were implemented.
As the debate continued, the word trust became the key word. Reducing bureaucracy means less government control – but also the opportunity to circumvent inconvenient political requirements without being noticed. Buschmann’s campaign against the mania for regulation, which he wants to continue in Brussels, was followed by numerous demands from business associations to abolish environmental protection regulations or to require companies to document that their supply chains are free of child labor.
Habeck’s State Secretary warns against expectations being too high
For the SPD and the Greens, the issue of de-bureaucratization is therefore not just a promise. It also creates conflict. At the same time, no one wants to be accused of not wanting to dismantle unnecessary regulations. Habeck’s Parliamentary State Secretary Michael Kellner (Greens) made an audible effort on Friday to leave no doubt about the support for the cause, but also warned against excessive expectations.
The Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection “contributed most of the measures to the Bureaucracy Relief Act IV with over 50 proposals,” said Kellner. Together with companies and associations, his company has also developed a “practice check” in which “entire regulatory areas are examined in direct exchange with practice and administration” for bureaucratic obstacles and their elimination, such as the solar industry. However, there are no simple solutions in sight and lawsuits are often threatened. “We have to imagine the modern Sisyphus as someone who rolls up the mountain not stones, but paragraphs,” says Kellner. And the draft law shows: “There is even more possible.”
Sonja Eichwede, the SPD’s legal policy spokeswoman in the Bundestag, also welcomed the law, but advised against insufficient simplification. On the one hand, the task of a constitutional state is to trust one another. On the other hand, however, anyone who, like CDU MP Günter Krings, demands that two other laws be abolished for every additional bureaucratic burden on companies is overshooting the mark. Not every regulation is a burden per se. Debureaucratization is often exploited. “That will not be possible with us,” said Eichwede. The SPD will therefore pay “very close attention” to ensuring that the protection of employees is maintained in the parliamentary process. This was to be understood as a quiet warning.