The digital flop in the offices

Consider: By the end of the year, 575 administrative services should be digitized nationwide according to the Online Access Act (OZG). But it won’t be more than 55, according to the established family entrepreneur Lutz Goebel, who is now also head of the National Regulatory Control Council. In the Handelsblatt guest comment he rants: “Germany is being left behind more and more, not only in terms of digitization.”

A contemporary, modern administration is a “real location factor”, according to Goebel. He relies on the “digital check” that will be mandatory from 2023 for the three levels of federal, state and local government and which the ministries must describe exactly.

Anke Domscheit-Berg, digital policy spokeswoman for the left faction, thinks that the federal, state and local governments are “not pulling in the same direction”. She was “stunned” by the digital change at a snail’s pace.

This is also due to the “Dashboard Digital Administration”: This is a platform on which the federal government provides data on the implementation of the OZG. Unfortunately, one does not know what comes digitally from Berlin and Saarland, since their data is not prepared in a format that is compatible with the dashboard. The future is being sought, but a few standards are needed first.

From the point of view of criminals who want to launder money, Germany has the status of “My beautiful laundromat”. Before the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) publishes a rather dismal report on the fight against money laundering this Friday, Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) wants to take action himself after years of stagnation.

• The showpiece of the concept is a Federal Financial Criminal Police Office, with its own search teams and real investigative powers.
• The previous anti-money laundering unit called the “Financial Intelligence Unit” (FIU) is no longer to be located at customs, but in the FATF.
• A coordinating central office is to take care of money laundering supervision. This applies above all to the real estate industry and the gambling industry, in which a lot of black money is traditionally laundered.

Sebastian Fiedler (SPD), former head of the Association of German Criminal Investigators, describes the magnitude of the task: “Of the estimated 100 billion euros that are laundered here every year, security authorities don’t even see one percent.”

donald trump apparently lives on in the belief that he was never voted out. In any case, that would explain why the ex-president is said to have taken at least 700 pages of secret documents with him after the exodus from the White House in January 2021. According to a letter from the US National Archives to a Trump lawyer in May, some of these are classified as top secret.

The papers were stored at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where the FBI recently visited and confiscated material. The letter said the government “must make an assessment of the potential harm resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported.” Trump has since filed a lawsuit against the US government, demanding a neutral examiner for the confiscated documents.

When an 89-year-old entrepreneur announces that he has separated from his crown prince and prefers to run the company himself again, the generation change can be regarded as a failure. This is what happened with patriarch Erwin Müller and his Ulm drugstore chain Müller, where managing director Günther Helm, 43, was suddenly thrown out.

This ends Senior’s plan to gradually withdraw (which he has been announcing for a long time) and also to transfer company shares to the newcomer. Everything Müller, or what? 35,000 employees are already familiar with the traditional, sometimes erratic management style of the “old man”. Proof of performance will be difficult for him: After a weak phase, things are said to have picked up again under Helm.

And another veteran of the economy is turning up the heat: the logistics entrepreneur Klaus-Michael Kühne, 85. In the “Frankfurter Allgemeine”, the owner of Kuehne + Nagel allows himself the luxury of exposing the constant whining of some companies about the Putin conflict as part of the lobbying intended to secure sinecures in the gas distribution struggle. According to Kühne, the Germans should stand up to the “warmonger” Putin even more.

The situation is schizophrenic: “We have a cruel enemy here who shouldn’t even be touched with pliers – and on the other hand we continue to transfer huge sums for his gas… It’s amazing how strongly the economy keeps influencing.” politics takes and politics shy away from unpopular measures. I don’t like this opportunism.”

News from Munich comes from Celonis, Germany’s most valuable start-up, which is valued at no less than 13 billion dollars. The last round of financing brought in another billion, including some money from the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, which puts its natural gas billions into many activities. For example, in the would-be champions of the Paris Saint-Germain football club or in the office software of the Celonis specialists, who use digital twins to detect inefficiencies in business processes (“process mining”).

The only thing Celonis doesn’t like to publish is balance sheets. The last one dates back to 2017. The Federal Office of Justice has already initiated administrative fine proceedings to persuade Celonis to disclose the balance sheets for 2018 and 2019. However, co-CEO Bastian Nominacher sees “a very strong obligation to disclose information in Germany, which entails competitive disadvantages” – which is why his company only presents balance sheets with a delay. Conclusion: An original justification – many other hidden champions would also think so.

The bankrupt company Wirecard, Germany’s biggest sham of the post-war period, has torn quite a few people down. Among other things, the auditing company EY has been under pressure for a long time: they stated that they had checked the balance sheets of the financial company. But now, after two years of digging, the auditor oversight body Apas has found that EY violated professional duties in its work for four years. That expands our cover story.

The former Wirecard auditors are now threatened with severe financial and professional sanctions. The catalog of measures ranges from a 500,000 euro fine to professional exclusion. Anyone who does not discover a fake sum of 1.9 billion euros at a Dax group has probably missed their job anyway.

And then there is the start-up show “Die Höhle der Löwen” on the private broadcaster Vox, which is entering its twelfth season – although the credit report Creditsafe gives the founders a rather bad report. The bankrupt vulture sometimes hovers over the cameras, as with the start-up company “Kuchentratsch”, in which investors put around 100,000 euros in 2018. But the yeast didn’t rise, and the formation of baking grandpas and grandmas finally filed for bankruptcy.

So far, 50 of the 248 companies that came to an investor deal with Vox have disappeared from the market after the TV show of good deeds. The probability of default, i.e. the risk of going bankrupt within twelve months, is on average 2.5 percent for cave start-ups, twice as high as in the German corporate landscape. Those affected can refer to Thomas Edison: “I didn’t fail – I discovered 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”

I wish you a resourceful day.

It greets you cordially
Her

Hans Jürgen Jakobs

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