When everything was going haywire in mid-April 2021, nobody actually wanted to speak to the press, says the Bremen-based building contractor Jan-Gerd Kröger.
The smaller construction companies in particular were afraid.
He could have afforded it.
Because the Autobahn GmbH of the federal government did not pay its bills, Kröger's company stopped working.
Sometimes for eight weeks in the spring nobody took care of the maintenance and repair of the 2,500 bridges and structures on the federal highways in the state of Bremen.
Kim Maurus
Volunteer.
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According to a media report, 20,000 unprocessed invoices had accumulated at Autobahn GmbH by mid-March, with a total of up to 1.2 billion euros. His strike worked, says Kröger, and the situation has subsequently improved. The Autobahn GmbH quickly helped the smaller companies with emergency transfers, and the local employees were very committed. But the cooperation is still not going smoothly.
The federal autobahn GmbH has been managing the 13,000 km of autobahns in Germany since the beginning of the year.
It is intended to bundle the tasks arising from planning, construction, maintenance and financing.
Previously, the federal states were responsible for this on behalf of the federal government.
After the reform was passed in 2017, it quickly became clear that the deadline of early 2021 is too short for the “biggest reform in the history of the autobahn”, as Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU) called his project.
The situation is improving
The big words weren't even exaggerated in this case. More than 10,000 employees moved from the federal states to the new company, ten branches and 41 branch offices were opened. Everything should become uniform and simpler. But then there were more reports of IT problems, staff shortages, questions of responsibility, unpaid bills and unexpectedly high reform costs. In the direction of the Ministry of Transport, contractor Kröger says: "The head has planned something big, the little man on site has to pay for it."
The situation has eased a little over the past few months.
At the request of the FAZ, the Autobahn GmbH of the federal government announced that “the invoice processing processes were constantly being improved”.
Since the start of operations, 136,000 bills have been paid and 6,000 are paid every week.
12,000 invoices are currently still outstanding, which corresponds to a “usual value”.
Every properly checked bill will be paid.
Felix Pakleppa, General Manager of the Central Association of the German Construction Industry (ZDB), also says: "Payment transactions are now running more smoothly." However, you can also see that "the processes within Autobahn GmbH are not yet 100 percent run like in the old organizational form".
Building contractor Kröger can tell you a thing or two about it. Since November last year, he has actually had to submit every invoice electronically using a standardized format. However, due to technical problems within Autobahn GmbH, the invoices were not forwarded to the relevant clerk after the central email inbox. That is why Kröger is now sending his bills by post, first to the Office for Roads and Transport in Bremen, which then forwards the documents to the federal company. If the responsible employee of the Autobahn GmbH then sits in the home office, the delivery is almost impossible.
As a result of the restructuring, decisive designations have also changed: project and invoice numbers, for example, or the designation for blocking plans that are used for construction sites. Of course, the internal assignment of the documents would then become a problem. “The sum of the little things is the biggest stumbling block,” says Kröger. If it were up to him, the employees on the lower management levels of Autobahn GmbH would have to be granted more competencies. In numerous matters he was told that they had to be discussed first. "This requires more clarity about decision-making processes and structures as quickly as possible," says ZDB Managing Director Pakleppa.