When it comes to digitization, Germany is a developing country - with completely unnecessary consequences for its citizens.
A particularly drastic example: the property tax return.
A scandal, says editor-in-chief Hans Moritz in his commentary on the weekend.
Calculated from this Saturday, property owners still have 18 days to submit their property tax returns.
The local tax offices have done everything to make it as easy as possible for them.
Yet it remains terribly complicated.
It is all the more astonishing that the uproar about this obligation is not greater.
The property tax return is a scandal.
And that doesn't change anything just because the federal government has extended the deadline to the end of January.
Because citizens are being asked for data that the father state has long had.
He just can't bring himself to bring them together.
The property tax return is a sad example of the state of digitization in this country - and that after three years of pandemic, which has offered a historic opportunity to finally catch up here.
What is the property tax return about?
About property sizes, the extent of residential or commercial use, enclosed space, types of use, parking areas, standard land values, field and district boundaries.
But shouldn't they be available long ago, for example as the basis for every building permit?
Of course, in land registry offices, building and financial authorities and residents' registration offices.
The problem: three administrative levels intertwine here: federal, state and local government.
And they are obviously not able to combine and digitize all this data.
Then a simple computer program would suffice, and the federal government could fulfill its obligation from the judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court of 2018 to recalculate the property tax.
Instead, the citizen is made a bailiff.
And on a grand scale, after all, there is talk of 36 million properties in the republic.
On average, there is one property for every two citizens.
In November 2022, the German Association of Civil Servants did not speak of insufficient digitization, but even of anti-digitization.
There are many more examples: Citizens still have to go to the town hall or district office in person because of too many concerns.
Digitization has made progress in schools.
But distance learning has been scrapped again.
It would be so easy to let sick students from home participate in the school hours.
The providers, especially municipalities and counties, have spent millions on it during the pandemic.
In the judiciary, including in Erding, the digital file project was stopped in many places during Corona - because tax revenue fell.
This means that files by the kilo are transported back and forth between the courts every day.
This is not only time-consuming, but also ecologically questionable and screaming to heaven if, in times of a dramatic lack of manpower, one were to calculate how many resources could be saved with optimal digitization - and how these workers would be employed more sensibly.
ham