bureaucracy
Regulatory Control Council plans recommendations for the new government
Updated on December 26, 2024Reading time: 3 min.
Without improved data management, simpler laws and more digital processes, German authorities will collapse, says Lutz Goebel, chairman of the Regulatory Control Council. What should be done?
In order to avoid a collapse of public administration in the medium term, the National Regulatory Control Council (NKR) believes that the next federal government must urgently make faster progress in reducing bureaucracy. “The administration is groaning,” says NKR chairman Lutz Goebel to the German Press Agency. More employees in the authorities are now retiring than new ones are coming. Therefore, the administration will no longer be able to implement the laws, which are far too complex, let alone monitor compliance with them.
The next federal government must tackle fundamental changes, think about the implementation of its legislative reforms and change processes. This means that more can be achieved than with many small individual measures.
This year, the traffic light coalition jointly passed the Bureaucracy Relief Act IV, which will come into force on January 1, 2025. The changes contained therein are intended to provide a total financial relief of 944 million euros per year. For example, the hotel registration requirement for German overnight guests will be abolished. Accounting documents only have to be kept for eight years instead of the previous ten.
Goebel announces that the NKR will make a series of recommendations for the next government before the next coalition negotiations at the latest. We must finally move away from the typically energy-sapping German desire for “individual justice” – i.e. legislation that takes all situations and circumstances into account. A “cultural change” is necessary here because “the administration can no longer do that.” Blanket regulations and random samples are better than excessive complexity and 100 percent control. “We have to say goodbye to being so suspicious of citizens and the economy.”
Goebel also likes some of the measures that have not been implemented from the so-called growth initiative, which Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) and the then Finance Minister, Christian Lindner (FDP), agreed to in the summer. Among other things, it said that the federal government would undertake to present a bureaucracy relief law every year in the future. This should ensure that the burden from all federal laws decreases overall in the respective year, even taking into account newly created regulations.
A key to success is also successful “registry modernization,” says the NKR chairman. The Federal Ministry of the Interior, which is responsible for this, must finally ensure that information and documents that are already available to the authorities are not requested again by companies, citizens and other authorities.
But it is also clear: “Without digitalization, the administration will never be able to keep up.” “Simpler laws” that take potential difficulties into enforcement into account are at least as important, says Goebel, who is himself an entrepreneur.
Austria and several Scandinavian countries are already much further along. Goebel gives an example of a process that, in his opinion, carefully manages the citizens’ time and nerves: “In Austria, the vehicle registration creates the insurance.”
The NKR chairman reports that he has only applied for funding for his company once. Because of the associated burden of proof, he then decided not to do this in the future, says Goebel. His conclusion: “It’s far too complicated.”
The NKR is an independent body with ten volunteer members. His tasks include examining the federal government’s draft laws to see whether the costs are presented correctly, whether there are more practical alternatives and whether the ministries have considered digital implementation from the start.
The traffic light coalition, which has since collapsed, had located the Regulatory Control Council, which had previously been based in the Chancellery, in the Federal Ministry of Justice, which was then still run by the FDP. The term of office of the members of the Regulatory Control Council is five years. A new appeal is permitted. The members may neither work in public administration nor be members of parliament.
The Ifo Institute recently estimated the costs of lost economic output in Germany as a result of excessive bureaucracy at 146 billion euros per year. In a survey of managers in May, almost 80 percent of the participating companies stated that they had to hire external service providers in order to meet bureaucratic requirements.