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Company vehicles in Hanover (symbolic image)
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Driving too fast or parked in a no-parking zone: When driving for business, employees of ministries or subordinate authorities like to collect fines - and often get off scot-free. This is the result of a small request from the Left Party parliamentary group to the federal government, which is exclusively available to SPIEGEL.
Among other things, the Left Party deputies wanted to know how many queries about the drivers there were by the police and public order offices at federal ministries and their subordinate authorities. The background to this is a report by the MDR, according to which drivers of state ministries in Saxony-Anhalt escaped prosecution of administrative offenses in road traffic because the responsible ministries did not want to reveal the respective drivers.
At the federal level, a clear picture emerges: At the top of the nodule ranking is the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI). By the end of April of this year alone, at least 1796 driver queries had been received for violations of the Highway Code. With reference to safety interests, however, the BMI did not specify how many vehicles or drivers are in use in total – and for whom exactly they were in use.
Many ministries with just one request
Numerous authorities are subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior, including the Federal Police and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Accordingly, there are many trips, more than in other ministries and their subordinate authorities. The Federal Ministry of Transport follows at a considerable distance with 71 queries. In the area of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, there were 25 inquiries about corresponding violations.
The Federal Ministry of Finance and Justice are more compliant: they are among the ministries that received only a single query each. The Ministry of Education, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Ministry of Construction and the Federal Press Office also received only one query each. As can be seen from the question, speeding and parking violations were responsible for the vast majority of the queries.
Drivers are often not named
In many cases, it remains unclear who drove the car: Due to so-called transmission blocks, ministries and authorities can refuse to name the drivers if, for example, security interests conflict with this. The interior authorities apparently make frequent use of this. Only in 362 out of 1796 cases was a driver named.
In the case of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, for example, the transmission is denied in order to avoid "conclusions on the working methods and methodology as well as the official vehicles used," according to the request. Since these drivers can then usually not be identified, their violations remain without consequences. In 2022, the BMI recorded 26 drivers who violated the Highway Code several times, compared to two so far this year.
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