2023-08-04 19:15:53
After the protests about significantly reduced funds for digitization projects in the budget for 2024, the Federal Ministry of the Interior has collected around 300 million euros in the past few days from funds not used in previous years. A ministry spokeswoman said on Friday in Berlin. This means that significantly more money would be available than the 3 million euros originally planned in the ministry’s budget. It remained unclear where these “remainders of expenditure” came from and why they had not yet been called up.
In the meantime, there is growing concern in the relevant ministries that the projects that have already been initiated under the Online Access Act (OZG) could stall. The first minister from the cabinet therefore now assures that she will secure the financing from her own budget so that the work can continue. The digitization of housing benefit and building applications continues to have a high priority, wrote Building Minister Klara Geywitz (SPD) on Platform X. “We will continue to provide sufficient funding for both OZG projects next year and can continue the good cooperation we have had with the federal states.”
This refers to Schleswig-Holstein, which is responsible for the digitization of the housing benefit procedure for all federal states, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, which oversees the digitization of building applications. For the next steps of these projects, around 13 million euros will be required in 2024, according to sources in the Ministry of Construction. And further: “We would assure them so that the work can continue.” There should be no relapse into “digital small-stateism”.
At the beginning of the week, a report by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung made it known that the Ministry of the Interior will not provide any further budgetary funds for the implementation of the Online Access Act in the coming year, but will let the funds expire as planned. This law was intended to ensure that by the end of 2022, hundreds of administrative services would also be accessible online to citizens. This was only partially successful, which is why a new edition of the law is planned – this time without fixed deadlines and without a fixed budget in the responsible BMI.
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In the future, the implementation of the measures will be financed solely by the responsible federal ministries and the federal states, according to the Ministry of the Interior. This was also agreed from the beginning. The resentment in the federal states is nevertheless great. Schleswig-Holstein has terminated its agreements with the Ministry of the Interior. According to its own statement, the Ministry of Building has therefore already stepped in in the area of housing benefit digitization.
The administration is digitized according to the “one-for-all” principle, according to which one federal state develops a digital project on behalf of all others and makes it available to the others. A number of applications are finished but not yet rolled out across the board. Digital politicians therefore fear a “project desert”.
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