“The accident insurance people keep inventing new procedures where they do nothing but send us a bill,” he told AFP.
“Taxes and bureaucracy are making it harder and harder to be efficient and pay attractive wages.”
The problem is real, and there is a report to prove it. The number of regulations has grown by 18 percent in Germany since 2014, according to government figures.
Critics charge that the time workers spent doing paperwork is a serious problem for a struggling economy already battered by high energy costs and growing Chinese competition.
The Ifo economic institute, factoring in a series of indirect costs, puts the figure even higher — at a whopping 146 billion euros or 3.4 percent of German economic output.
Digitisation is often touted as the answer — the foreign ministry this year was proud to announce it had finally moved visa applications online — but IT does not always prove to be the magic bullet.
Lutz Krause, who owns a construction company, said a new electronic invoicing system designed to help the government keep better track of receipts takes even longer to complete than the former paper system.
He said government clients were now the most difficult to deal with.
To get work on a construction site at Berlin Airport, he said, employees had to pass a security course that included written exams.
“More and more, we’re just avoiding government work,” he said.
‘Red tape radar’
German bureaucracy, according to Ifo rankings, is far heavier than in France or the Nordic countries, though not as onerous as in some other developed nations.
