If you want to know what is wrong with digitization in Germany, you should take a look at the current procedure for recalculating property tax.

Bernhard Rohleder describes it like this: Currently, the citizens are collecting the data from the various offices, bundling them and sending them back to the tax office.

"This is a completely superfluous process in which the state uses its citizens to provide an administrative service," criticized the managing director of the digital association Bitkom on Tuesday in Berlin at the press conference at the start of the "Smart Country Convention" conference.

Corinna Budras

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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For reasons of data protection alone, the administration only thinks in terms of "data silos".

"Our administrations are not allowed to pass the data on to each other," explained Rohleder.

In addition, there is the problem that in Germany "simple things are often made very complicated", he said with regard to the federal structures of the Federal Republic.

“In Germany there are sixteen duchies that think and do their own administration.

If we want to make administration faster, we need state structural reform,” Rohleder demanded.

"We cannot survive successfully in the digital world with these structures."

Austria has a central register – Germany does not

Meanwhile, in neighboring Austria, one can observe how the problem can also be tackled.

It is no coincidence that Austria has been invited as a partner country to present its innovations at the congress.

Instead of working in "data silos", they are working on a "register and system network" in which the data is stored centrally, reports Florian Tursky, State Secretary for Digitization and Broadband in Austria.

He calls this approach "once only": the data only has to be recorded once and is then accessible in the various registers.

This Wednesday, the Austrian Minister of the Interior will present the e-ID app, the "digital wallet" that will contain all ID cards in the future, Tursky announced.

It starts with the digital driver's license.

From now on it will be possible

Citizens in Germany also want such opportunities.

A majority of 88 percent of Germans want their city or community to push ahead with the digitization of their administration, according to a Bitkom survey published on Tuesday.

Around a thousand adults in Germany were interviewed for the representative survey.

According to this, there is a growing willingness among Germans to handle administrative matters digitally and to save themselves the time for official visits.

According to the study, 89 percent of Germans would apply for or renew their identity card online.

69 percent would also like to register their place of residence online, while 65 percent of those surveyed would apply for their registration confirmation online.

The citizens are dissatisfied

All of this is not yet possible in Germany, which is why the majority of citizens are dissatisfied with the digital offerings of their administration.

According to the survey, 64 percent consider their city to be digitally backward.

Only 33 percent rate their city or municipality as advanced.

This means that the proportion of dissatisfied people has increased significantly compared to the previous study two years earlier - even though a lot has happened digitally in the meantime.

At that time, only 57 percent of those surveyed expressed clear criticism of the digital offer.

For Rohleder, this shows one thing above all: "People's expectations are increasing faster than the administration can digitalize." He demanded: "The administration can sometimes surprise its citizens." To do this, however, the public sector must now massively accelerate the digital transformation.

According to the Bitkom general manager, some administrative services should not only be offered digitally in the future, but also run completely automatically, for example after the birth of a child.

This also works in Austria.

If a woman has a child there, it is automatically registered and the parents receive an e-mail with the things that need to be done now - and the offer to apply for parental months.

Germany is still a long way from this service.

"The office has to be sexy," says Secretary of State Tursky.