How Digital Is Germany?

https://mertbulan.com/2025/07/13/how-digital-is-germany/

by mertbio • 1 year ago

6 4 1 year ago

mertbulan.com

stop502• 1 year ago

You don't have to wait for the commercial tax id. After the person send the paperwork they can use the private tax id.

bakigul• 1 year ago

I guess they might be afraid of potential data leaks, that could be why they avoid full digital integration.

stop502• 1 year ago

DPOs care about leaks, others not really. Mist digitalization is done in the way that the paper form is now an html form. And every city tries to do it by themself, without cooperating with even their neighbours. And it doesn't get better at the higher level. ELSTER is one of the few examples where multiple agencys coorperated. It was developed by the bavaria branch of the German IRS and all branches use it now.

nicbou• 1 year ago

I help people settle in Germany. This is a very accurate post in my opinion.

In the end, perhaps digitalisation saves me from visiting an office in person, but the processes are still painfully slow and opaque. You still fire off PDFs into the void. There is rarely any prevalidation of your documents, so there can be a 6-week lag between the submission and the validation. People are terrified of making mistakes, especially because each case worker makes their own rule. During that time you can't inquire about the status of your application, or even refer to it when adding more documents. It's a far cry from a proper ticketing system.

One other thing I did not see: using your ID for authentication is ridiculously complicated and confusing. Nobody does it unless they're forced to. Immigrants are often left without a valid ID for months, again because of delays in processing time.

How Digital Is Germany?

Related Stories