Imagine: You just want to download the payroll quickly. A simple process, you might think. But instead, you end up in a digital obstacle course of locked accounts, mysterious apps, and endless authentication loops.
Welcome to German Digitalization 2025! read in this article.
The vicious cycle of two-factor authentication
What is sold as ‘more security’ turns out to be a digital dead end for millions of Germans without a technical background. The problem usually begins harmlessly: For example, the employer uses a service provider for payroll accounting. In order to get your own data, you have to register there and install an app.
So far, so good. It works fine. But then something like this happens quickly:
- You change your smartphone or reset it
- The authentication app is gone
- Your old account is still linked to your email address
- Therefore, you cannot create a new account (“email already issued”).
- The old account is unreachable (no access code anymore)
Congratulations - you are now in the digital trap! Your email is like a ghost in the system: Available, but not tangible.
The app store trap: When Help is Expensive
Many are desperately looking for solutions in the app store. Here is the next trap: dubious clone apps that look like real authenticator tools but contain hidden subscriptions. One click too much, and you pay 7-15 euros a month for an app that doesn't even work in the worst case.
Technical background: Reputable authenticator apps like Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator are free. Paid variants could e.g. Be a password manager with additional functions that can then be paid for their services.
Example 1 – DATEV: The digital monopolist
DATEV is not a small start-up, but dominates the market for payroll accounting in Germany. Some 2.5 million workers will be able to access their data via their system – theoretically. In practice, many fail due to technocratic user hostility.
The problem: The system is like a door lock that requires the old key but does not accept a replacement key – and still rejects any new registration attempt with ‘belongs to someone’.
Example 2 – ELSTER: (personal experience)
The Elster Portal can also provide some hurdles if you once had an account there more than 10+ years ago, but then either used a tax consultant for a long time or submitted your declaration via other tools.
The password reset only succeeds at the e-mail address stored in the account, if you can remember it. Alternatively, you can also enter the username you used at the time to display your e-mail address – but that also requires good documentation or a good memory. After several years abroad, neither one nor the other is known. However, it is not possible to register again, because there is already an account to the person.
The basic possibility to authenticate with the eID alternatively as owner works but only if you can still remember parts of the then account. I'll make it short:
In the end, in such a case, only an email to a supporter will help, who can then tell you either the username or the email, if your other information is correct or probably also offers you to move your account to a current email address for the sake of simplicity.
Example 3 – Employment Agency
In the case of the employment agency, too, the interaction of the individual digital services is sometimes unnecessarily complicated. Let's say you register as a job seeker, as a brave new-country citizen, of course, digitally. To do this, you simply create an account with the Federal Employment Agency and then enter your data there. This can also be done with Passkey and secured by 2FA. So far so good.
A few days later, a letter with a 36-page manual on rights, obligations and the operation of the online portal, together with the questionnaire, which you already know from the online mask, comes only empty. Fill in by hand again. Yeah, yeah!
If you have done this and sent it back, with a little luck, you will get a call for further data that has not yet been queried online or in the print form – presumably as an additional second ‘security factor’ that the person actually exists?
Afterwards, you will receive a message from your caregiver in the online account, but you will not be able to respond to it on your PC/MAC or mobile phone. According to the message on the website, this can only be done via the BA-Mobil app. Why? Anyway, so still loaded the app. Answer sent, fits.
But in order to be able to enter your bank details later, should unemployment actually occur, you need a ‘more secure digital login option’, which is no longer possible with the BA account from above, then you need the BundID, you transfer your bank data!
Once you have set up the BundID, it will probably be internally linked to the BA account, from then on you can no longer log in via the BA-mobil app. Is it really supposed to be like that?
Political failure: Digitization without consideration
The policy celebrates ‘digital administration’, but leaves the implementation to private providers. The result: Systems that rely on maximum protection, not user-friendliness. Anyone who can't or won't keep up has been unlucky.
The message is clear: Play with or stay outside
What we are experiencing is not technical modernization, but digital incapacity. The message to citizens is: You only get your own data if you play the whole game – including all risks, apps, costs and technical hurdles.
The reality outside: People who need their payroll two to three times a year are treated like IT specialists. Those who do not keep pace are digitally excluded.
Conclusion: Back to People
Real digitalization should simplify life, not complicate it. Instead, we are experiencing a gradual withdrawal of the concept of service in favor of technocratic efficiency.
What we really need to pick everyone up:
- Systems tested with the most inexperienced users
- Analogous alternatives for digital services
- A digital ethics that understands the human being as a subject, not as a data set
- Political regulation that promotes freedom of choice rather than coercion
Because if even access to one's own payroll becomes a hurdle, digitization has failed its purpose. It's time for a more human digital future.
Source: Afterthought pages - Digital dead ends by Günther Burbach
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