Germany’s infamously unwieldy and old-fashioned bureaucracy is to be given a welcome digital boost with a new law to make electronic identification easier and more efficient.
Whether registering a new residency, a baby or a car, or applying for child support or a driving licence, German citizens will in future be able to do so by mobile phone in combination with an existing identity card.
The government has promised that about 575 services will be digitised under the new system, which was passed into law by the Bundestag on Thursday night.
The expectation is for less bureaucracy and greater efficiency in a country that lags far behind neighbours such as Denmark or Estonia in digitising government bodies. Advocates hope the new law will help Germany move away from its reputation for being digitalscheu – digitally shy – expressed best in its heavy dependence on cash, pen and paper, and even fax machines.
Eleven years ago Germany’s identity card system, which requires every citizen to own either a card or a passport, was overhauled with the introduction of plastic, credit-card style electronic chip cards. The card was supposed to make identification more efficient and to cut down the need for people to book time slots, take time off work and queue to see a civil servant to fulfil even the most basic of administrative tasks.
But a lack of joined-up technology, together with bureaucrats’ own reluctance and a general mistrust of identity cards – often due to the experience of the Nazi and GDR dictatorships – led to the so-called eID hardly being used in the way it was intended.
“Germany is an analogue village of opening times, time slots, form-filling, rubber stamps and photo booths,” Der Spiegel said in an article bemoaning the country’s digital hesitancy.
Under the new legislation the card, available from the age of 16 and valid for 10 years, will be useable in combination with a six-digit code and a mobile device such as a phone or a tablet. The identification process will be similar to that used in online banking or shopping, which have shot up in popularity during the pandemic.
Some data protection experts have weighed in, insisting Germans are being forced to digitise their lives against their will and arguing that the eID will give law enforcement agencies and tax officials too much access to citizens’ information and photo IDs.
With an election looming in September, digitisation is top of the agenda. Poor broadband access in rural areas and schools, and the lack of an electronic patient database, are seen to have hampered Germany’s response to coronavirus pandemic.
Germany’s track and trace programme epitomised the concerns over an analogue culture, with officials often resorting to making hand-written checklists.
But nothing came to better symbolise Germany’s digital shortcomings than the fax machine, which was the go-to method to ferry crucial data between health authorities and the government’s disease control agency, the Robert Koch Institute. Despite the introduction of digital programmes in January, faxing is still the favourite form of communicating data for many test laboratories.
Last year a parliamentary inquiry by the pro-business Free Democrats revealed that the federal government was still using more than 900 fax machines. Up to two-thirds of German companies say they regularly use them. Breaking the habit it likely to be hard. Justification for their use is more often than not the security they provide compared with digital systems which – as Germany has too often found out – can be hacked.
More urgently Germany now faces the pressing challenge as to how it will issue digital vaccine passes to ensure its citizens, where eligible, can partake in the European Union’s “digital green certificate” programme to allow travel within the bloc this summer.
The health minister, Jens Spahn, has promised it will be introduced by the end of June but one challenge is how to digitise vaccine data that has not been centrally collated.
Ariane Schenk, from the Bitkom association that represents a large part of Germany’s digital economy, said she believed what hindered Germany most was not a lack of technological know-how, but a lack of flexibility.
“At the end of the day it’s a question of mentality,” she told the broadcaster MDR. “Before we develop something technical, we often have endless debates about it, instead of just getting on with it. The advantage of digital products is that they can be customised later … but we’re lacking this flexibility somewhat.”