Two years after a legal deadline for hundreds of bureaucratic procedures to be made available online, fewer than a third are available electronically across Germany, a new study has found.
The German Economic Institute (IW) study found that of the 575 administrative services that were supposed to be available online by the end of 2022 in accordance with the 2017 Online Access Act (OZG), only 166 were available everywhere in the country as of January 2025. That represents an increase of just 13 on the previous year.
The worst-performing states were Saarland, where just 196 OZG services were available across the state, followed by Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony, with 197 each.
The best performer was Hamburg, where 290 of the services were available, followed by Bavaria and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
In news that will surprise few foreigners living in Germany, the report said that Germany was lagging behind European peers when it comes to accessing government services online.
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“The digitalisation of administration is still progressing far too slowly in Germany,” the IW study said. The authors added that at the current pace, even Hamburg would need over four more years to meet the 2022 legal requirement, while Hesse and Saxony would need another 15 years.
"A digital Germany is still a distant prospect,” according to the report.
One barrier is Germany’s federal system, which means the nationwide goal must be implemented by 16 states and over 11,000 local authorities. Insufficient coordination between federal, state and local governments and a lack of penalties for missing deadlines contributed to the missed deadline.
Another is analogue – “paper” – procedures being simply replicated digitally, instead of redesigned. Forms submitted digitally are often handled manually by civil servants, instead of automatically processed by computer systems, for example.
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Businesses report frustration with bureaucracy, including having to submit the same data multiple times and different authorities not being able to share information with each other, the IW wrote.
It added that bureaucracy remains a significant obstacle to business efficiency. Nearly 100,000 individual standards must be complied with by law, a 21 percent increase on 2010. This has resulted in compliance costs of some €67 billion for companies in 2024.
And while previous governments have passed legislation to reduce the bureaucratic burden on companies, the IW calculated that over two-thirds of the savings were in fact due to digitalisation, not bureaucratic simplification.
Some of the 575 procedures the OZG was supposed to make available digitally include:
- Registering births and marriages
- Applying for citizenship and permanent residency
- Declaring real estate taxes
- Applying for parking permits
- Registering a business
The OZG was amended in 2024 with the so-called OZG 2.0 intended to speed up digitalisation and particularly facilitate some of the most common procedures, including registering residency, marriages and driving licenses.
The OZG 2.0 also created the BundID system, allowing residents to identify themselves when interacting with the government online.
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