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It almost went completely unnoticed. Under a law that deals predominantly with the taxation of electromobility, the Federal Government promotes backroom policy. Instead of finally creating transparency about the influence of lobbyists on laws, it anchors the lack of transparency.
What is it all about? Representatives of federal and state financial authorities regularly exchange information about developments in the financial sector. They agree on a nationwide approach, be it in questions of interpretation of tax laws or strategies against tax tricks. Here is often negotiated hard, because it is in the fiscal policy like once for large sums.
So far, the corresponding protocols or other meeting documents have not been published in practice. However, there was a possibility that courts would force the administration to surrender because there was no legal basis for secrecy. In the future, an exemption shields this area completely from inquiries for the Freedom of Information Act.
What are these sessions about? The best example is Cum-Ex - the biggest tax theft in German history. Actors could be reimbursed by shifting back and forth a security they never paid. The fact that the business was successful for so long was also due to a massive failure in politics and public authorities. Why were not hints taken up? How could it be that the federal government and the states agreed to take one proposal from the banking association one-to-one - after which the criminal cum-ex-business really got going? In order to find out, one must be able to understand the decision-making between federation and countries. But that is exactly what should be prevented by law.
That's how the trickery worked
After a bankruptcy verdict of the Federal Fiscal Court on so-called cum-cum transactions (which are similar to the Cum-Ex), suggested the well-known as a bank-friendly Ministry of Finance Hesse, a regulation before, with the effect of this verdict should be undermined: The banks should have been able to keep all profits from the cum-cum deal - a billion-dollar gift. Only at the last minute was it possible to rewrite this regulation only through the intervention of the then NRW Finance Minister Norbert Walter-Borjans.
In the future, it should now be prevented by law that it is possible to clearly assign responsibility for such decisions through access to minutes.
The Federal Ministry of Finance argues that the new regulation serves "to ensure that the confidential deliberations in an atmosphere of openness and without compulsion to take account of external interests or demands for justification can be based solely on the substance of an exchange of arguments and an unaffected vote."
How naive is that ?! The opposite is true: as long as there is a chance that results will become public, it is much harder to cite extraneous arguments and enforce particular interests.
And the current work of the tax authorities would not be jeopardized by transparency anyway. This has already excluded section 3 of the Freedom of Information Act.
It is a central element of democracy that actors disclose and defend their position. Instead of plowing the way to the detriment of taxpayers, on the contrary, it should be made clear in every law and every regulation that regulations have not been developed in the ministry, but have been proposed by external experts or interest groups. Only in this way can harmful lobby influences be deliberately revealed.
