7 ms·

The State of eGovernment in Germany

91 points by endymi0n 13y ago

aristidb 13y ago
I think it's not entirely valid to generalize from one example to the "State of eGovernment in Germany". Don't get me wrong, it's not in a good state. But also not always as horrifying as this example. (And it's much better here in the Netherlands.)
- danieldk 13y ago
  (And it's much better here in the Netherlands.) Having recently moved from NL -> DE, I can't agree more. Dutch citizens have one account (DigID) that can be used with nearly all government services. Moving within the Netherlands, reporting taxes, etc. is a breeze. There is even a portal where you get an overview of nearly everything (pension status, study loan, etc.). Here every thing is paper and you have to sign and complete dozens of forms, many partly overlapping. That said, they were all processed quickly and well, and my employer was very helpful in getting everything sorted out. Of course, one upside of the German system is that it gives (the impression of) more privacy :). Not to complain about Germany in general, it's a wonderful country.
  - sveme 13y ago
    There have been initiatives to unify the different government services under one account in Germany, however, whenever someone proposes to aggregate all citizen data in one database, a huge outcry ensues. The basic reason is really that no government entity should know too much about a citizen, so that 39-45 will not that easily be repeated. Sort of security by obfuscation. It is in a way similar to the current google story, google trying to unify all its offerings in one account, thereby making the experience much smoother and helpful, and people refusing this because they don't want google to know that much about them.
kybernetyk 13y ago
Oh man, I know that. I have to put up with German bureaucracy regularly. Compared to my experiences with running a company in the UK it's almost like the Germans don't want you to run a company at all.
- brador 13y ago
  Why not start the company in the UK and just run it from Germany? It's all in the EU, right?
  - junto 13y ago
    I'm fairly sure that under German rules such a company (single director, Germany based) would be treated as German. Thus all taxes would need to be paid in Germany. You'd have double accounting, and have to file (manually) null accounts in the UK to satisfy Companies House, and file actual accounts in Germany. Royal pain in the ass.
  - kybernetyk 13y ago
    Well, when I'm living in Germany I still have to register the branch of the Ltd here. And I still have to register with the Handelsregister, put up with the IHK and the stupendous tax system. A Ltd. doesn't really have any advantage in that scenario besides fast incorporation times.
- UK-AL 13y ago
  It's because the UK is Entrepreneurial. No body bats an eyelid if a 16 year old starts a company in the UK. It's normal. In Germany, your meant to have the correct education, certificates, and experience before your own company. There's tons of red tape.
  - patrickg 13y ago
    Huh? What stops anybody from registering a company at the Handelsregister and start working? Who needs a certificate and a proof of experience? Or do you mean society enforces it?
patrickg 13y ago
Losing my karma: This article is (partly) BS. I have just tried the steps in the page, and it worked like a breeze. 2013-05-26, 23:10 CET: The link is not hidden, it is clearly visible and with correct description. Currently this works also on a sunday. 2013-05-27, 19:30 CET: Login / registration works on Chrome / OS X .No forced logout. 2013-05-28: link activation worked fine without problem and so on. I don't want to say that the OP is wrong, it might be the OP has experienced exactly what he has. But generalizing this is total bs. I have done many bureaucratic steps here in Germany and most of them were really fine (submitting tax forms, applying for tax ID, business registration (Gewerbeanmeldung, Handelsregister), banking account, healthcare insurance, ...). There are many different places where to submit forms, but usually the local trade organizations (Handelskammern) help you by organizing / bundling things together. Been there, done that.
- endymi0n 13y ago
  Some things seem to work better now, I freely admit I've had less trouble when reuploading for the second time today. Still, the majority of no-go's like not being able to read PDFs generated on OSX, workflows that as a best case scenario take more time and effort than with paper or not being able to receive mails signed with an official German electronic ID fully remain. Yup, it's a quite emotional rant based on some experiences that were unique to my timing and circumstances and yes, from the non-government big insurances and banks you are mentioning, I've already seen much better. Maybe I should not have been generalizing here, but regularly using and accessing services as the european Tax ID verification or the ECB exchange rate APIs, I could find many many more horrifying examples of user and developer experience and honestly I haven't seen a good counterexample that would give me hope. To this date, usability and convenience in Government are a one-way street: As a business owner, I'm forced to file my taxes electronically, however electronic bank statements and bills in electronic document formats are still not regularly accepted by the tax authorities...
- queeerkopf 13y ago
  Dealing with the official bureaucracy in germany is in general quite cumbersome. The IT solutions provided by the government mostly reimplement the offline processes in the online world. I fully agree that this seems ridiculously complex and time-consuming compared to the sleak UX we're accustomed to on the net. However due to the federal structure of germany your experience can vary wildly depending on in which state and city you live. I live in Munich and was recently pleasantly surprised how easy it was to request my postal voting documents for the upcoming elections. Took me only 30 seconds or so :) I think the city council of munich does quite a good job at innovating their IT infrastructure. Most notably the limux project [1] but in other areas like open data and open government as well [2]. Though there is of course still a lot of space for further improvements. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux [2] http://www.it-muenchen-blog.de http://www.it-muenchen-blog.de (german)
danmaz74 13y ago
This is similar enough to experiences I had in Italy. I would have expected Germany to be more advanced in this. I've also been thinking many times how cool it would be if somebody started creating an open source framework for EU e-government, considering that many problems are common to all governments.
- chestnut-tree 13y ago
  "how cool it would be if somebody started creating an open source framework for EU e-government" I agree this would be brilliant. I know in the UK the gov.uk site is all open source: https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov They recently published a blog post about how the New Zealand Government Online team used some of the gov.uk code. http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/07/26/working-with-govt-nz/ http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/07/26/working-with-... I'd love to see a pan-European initiative to pool resources and knowledge.
  - danmaz74 13y ago
    What the UK is doing is commendable - unfortunately, they're also the most unlikely to work at a EU level. What I was thinking about was more of a grass-roots thing, started by hackers who want the e-government to come to the 21st century. Who knows, if my current startup turns out well and I'll have time to think about something different, I could work on that :)
    - benilov 13y ago
      Grassroots sounds nice, but the hard work isn't writing the code - it's convincing those within government that user-centered services and open source are the way to go. I believe that this can only be achieved given a strong mandate, from within government itself.
      - danmaz74 13y ago
        Based on my experience in Italy - with my former employer we did some work with public administrations - my idea would be to start with cash-strapped local administrations and the most forward-looking of their suppliers. These administrations basically have all the same needs, but many of them are served by small suppliers that always have to reinvent the wheel with some half-cooked proprietary solution. If there was a well-designed, free open source GPL solution that already coverered 80% of the requirements, that could give a competitive advantage to those who based their offer on that solution. They would then compete only on service and customization. As I see it, the problem would be mostly to kickstart the development of that GPL platform - no for-profit company could do that, it would be against their interest. But if a big and committed enough community started it, then it could create a positive feedback loop that could be very difficult to stop. IMHO this could be a field where the GPL could give its best (I'm not pasdaran of the GPL, and released my own little open source contributions as MIT).
SchizoDuckie 13y ago
Wow. Sounds like Hotel California...
_quasimodo 13y ago
You should have embedded the scan as an Image into a Word 97 compatible .doc file :)
BjoernKW 13y ago
Even their electronic tax declaration system (which you're required to use as a company in Germany) isn't working properly at times. You should think that - of all things - they should at least get that one right. Germany government IT basically is a joke. Just Google for 'toll collect' for additional hilarity.
- brazzy 13y ago
  Toll collect is actually working just fine. The original rollout was just a disaster because of a politically driven unrealistic deadline. And that never happens in nongovernment projects, yeah, right...
- kybernetyk 13y ago
  Heh, our only Windows PC in the office is used just for this. We're otherwise a Mac/Linux shop and the last time I tried filling my (personal) taxes with the Mac it failed horribly. At that time their Java applet wouldn't work with every browser and with the most recent JVM on OS X. So I had to switch through browsers, Google around and downgrade my Java VM. After some tinkering (a lost Saturday) it finally worked but I don't want something like that in my business. That's why we have one PC here :)
  - voidiac 13y ago
    Why not run your Windows in a VM and get rid of the PC?
rapala 13y ago
E-government has at least two big problems, and the author faced both of those. First, the users need to be authenticated, as in you are the person you claim to be authenticated. Almost no other web service actually needs to know that. Banks are an other exception and for example here in Finland they provide authentication for other private and government web services. Finland also has those secure chip ID cards the author briefly mentioned. The problem with those is that, at least here in Finland, nobody has them. And most of those who have one, don't own a reader needed to use the chip. The second problem is about logging and archiving. Governments are subject to very strict laws and regulations about how certain cases need to be handled. The are processes to follow. Who did which step when has to be recorded. When the case is finally closed, every piece of paper about the case needs to be archived. Was something denied because a letter from the applicant did not have the necessary information? That letter needs to be archived. All this is manageable when the case is handled in paper. If the case is handled using a web service, things get more complicated. The system has to log all actions done in the case. It has to archive documents in proper ways. That's not impossible. But it is harder than stamping and signing papers for those whose jobs have been about stamping and signing papers for years. It's also harder for those implementing the web service, as most of the strict regulations don't apply in other projects. All this means that big money needs to used for creating something that adds complexity and is not strictly necessary, and oh boy the government likes to skimp on those kind of projects.
- jpatokal 13y ago
  I'm a little surprised you don't mention Finland's rather effective solution: banks act as an authentication service, so you can log into to your bank to prove who you are, and the bank then redirects you to the original website. As Finland has only half a dozen or so consumer banks, and virtually everybody had an account with one or more, this works quite nicely.
  - benilov 13y ago
    The UK is adopting a similar approach: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/01/17/identity-beyond/ http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/01/17/identity-beyo...
Tagedieb 13y ago
Postage is 58 cents. Not the smallest error in the article.
kleiba 13y ago
Yep, sounds like an accurate description. Or at least, it wouldn't surprise me at all to have such an experience. But then again, I think I'd never be so foolish and even _try_ to do something like that online: Germany is easily 10 years behind countries like the U.S., Canada, Australia, etc. If there's a possibility to snail mail something, I'd choose that any time. Or show up in person at the office in question. Not that the latter would be an experience any more pleasant...
sampo 13y ago
Finnish State Railways (www.vr.fi), a monopoly that operates all the trains in Finland, closes their webshop from 1.30am to 4am every night. During the close time you cannot buy train tickets.
- Semaphor 13y ago
  Used to (I don't know if it still is, I switched banks) be similar for Sparkasse online banking. The website closed some time in the evening and reopened at 6am.
  - kybernetyk 13y ago
    Heh, when I was living in Poland for some years the biggest internet bank closed their online banking over the weekend. Well, they didn't close it. They just didn't take orders for wire transfers. Not reading the message that popped up - I assumed it's something along the line of "your order will be filled on monday" - made me miss my first rent payment :3 No idea why they couldn't just queue orders over the weekend. That said: I've seen a lot of IT shit all over the world. No country is immune to stupid people sitting at the steering wheel of IT departments.
    - Semaphor 13y ago
      At least you could access your account, Sparkasse didn't even allow me to log in -.-
Semaphor 13y ago
It is to be expected, after all, the internet is a new thing for all of us according to our chancellor.
vdp 13y ago
Well, at least you have something in Germany. In Bulgaria after 15 years and over half a billion euros spent(and we are talking about one of Europe's poorest countries here) there is almost nothing practically usable done.
D9u 13y ago
I thought that many German municipalities were switching to Linux based systems? Is it not succeeding, or are there other issues? (I don't get out much anymore. I live on a rock in the middle of the Earth's largest ocean, on one of the most isolated land masses on Earth.)
ams6110 13y ago
This sort of stuff is why I still do my 1040 by hand on paper and mail it in. It's just easier.
cLeEOGPw 13y ago
And to top that, German government probably paid millions for anyone who created the system, and since the system crashes so much they now need to pay all the time to keep it running. In my country such projects appear when there is massive corruption at that field.
aaronh 13y ago
Nothing new here. In NY state you have to send in your Article of Organization to the NYS Division of Corps. You then receive a confirmation mailing which you have to turn around and send in to the NYS Dept. of Taxation, so they, you know, know you exist to tax. Durr! The state already knows it exists, it just registered it, why am I playing mailboy and shuffling mail between two departments which are probably within walking distance of each other!
ryanweal 13y ago
This closely resembles my experience getting my business established with Québec. Eventually I sent an email to the helpdesk complaining about all of the issues and in return they sent me an address to an office downtown. That office is the helpdesk and processing center. Since then I go to the office every time, chat with the people, ask questions, fill out my forms, and they process it immediately. It took over one year to finally gain access to all the components of the online system. I still can't read their PDFs because they require an Adobe plugin for PDF "security". At any rate, see if you have the ability to go in person. Helps with the language barrier and probably more effective.

91 points by endymi0n 13y ago

I think it's not entirely valid to generalize from one example to the "State of eGovernment in Germany". Don't get me wrong, it's not in a good state. But also not always as horrifying as this example. (And it's much better here in the Netherlands.)

danieldk 13y ago
(And it's much better here in the Netherlands.) Having recently moved from NL -> DE, I can't agree more. Dutch citizens have one account (DigID) that can be used with nearly all government services. Moving within the Netherlands, reporting taxes, etc. is a breeze. There is even a portal where you get an overview of nearly everything (pension status, study loan, etc.). Here every thing is paper and you have to sign and complete dozens of forms, many partly overlapping. That said, they were all processed quickly and well, and my employer was very helpful in getting everything sorted out. Of course, one upside of the German system is that it gives (the impression of) more privacy :). Not to complain about Germany in general, it's a wonderful country.
- sveme 13y ago
  There have been initiatives to unify the different government services under one account in Germany, however, whenever someone proposes to aggregate all citizen data in one database, a huge outcry ensues. The basic reason is really that no government entity should know too much about a citizen, so that 39-45 will not that easily be repeated. Sort of security by obfuscation. It is in a way similar to the current google story, google trying to unify all its offerings in one account, thereby making the experience much smoother and helpful, and people refusing this because they don't want google to know that much about them.

kybernetyk 13y ago

Oh man, I know that. I have to put up with German bureaucracy regularly. Compared to my experiences with running a company in the UK it's almost like the Germans don't want you to run a company at all.

brador 13y ago
Why not start the company in the UK and just run it from Germany? It's all in the EU, right?
- junto 13y ago
  I'm fairly sure that under German rules such a company (single director, Germany based) would be treated as German. Thus all taxes would need to be paid in Germany. You'd have double accounting, and have to file (manually) null accounts in the UK to satisfy Companies House, and file actual accounts in Germany. Royal pain in the ass.
- kybernetyk 13y ago
  Well, when I'm living in Germany I still have to register the branch of the Ltd here. And I still have to register with the Handelsregister, put up with the IHK and the stupendous tax system. A Ltd. doesn't really have any advantage in that scenario besides fast incorporation times.
UK-AL 13y ago
It's because the UK is Entrepreneurial. No body bats an eyelid if a 16 year old starts a company in the UK. It's normal. In Germany, your meant to have the correct education, certificates, and experience before your own company. There's tons of red tape.
- patrickg 13y ago
  Huh? What stops anybody from registering a company at the Handelsregister and start working? Who needs a certificate and a proof of experience? Or do you mean society enforces it?

patrickg 13y ago

Losing my karma: This article is (partly) BS. I have just tried the steps in the page, and it worked like a breeze. 2013-05-26, 23:10 CET: The link is not hidden, it is clearly visible and with correct description. Currently this works also on a sunday. 2013-05-27, 19:30 CET: Login / registration works on Chrome / OS X .No forced logout. 2013-05-28: link activation worked fine without problem and so on. I don't want to say that the OP is wrong, it might be the OP has experienced exactly what he has. But generalizing this is total bs. I have done many bureaucratic steps here in Germany and most of them were really fine (submitting tax forms, applying for tax ID, business registration (Gewerbeanmeldung, Handelsregister), banking account, healthcare insurance, ...). There are many different places where to submit forms, but usually the local trade organizations (Handelskammern) help you by organizing / bundling things together. Been there, done that.

endymi0n 13y ago
Some things seem to work better now, I freely admit I've had less trouble when reuploading for the second time today. Still, the majority of no-go's like not being able to read PDFs generated on OSX, workflows that as a best case scenario take more time and effort than with paper or not being able to receive mails signed with an official German electronic ID fully remain. Yup, it's a quite emotional rant based on some experiences that were unique to my timing and circumstances and yes, from the non-government big insurances and banks you are mentioning, I've already seen much better. Maybe I should not have been generalizing here, but regularly using and accessing services as the european Tax ID verification or the ECB exchange rate APIs, I could find many many more horrifying examples of user and developer experience and honestly I haven't seen a good counterexample that would give me hope. To this date, usability and convenience in Government are a one-way street: As a business owner, I'm forced to file my taxes electronically, however electronic bank statements and bills in electronic document formats are still not regularly accepted by the tax authorities...
queeerkopf 13y ago
Dealing with the official bureaucracy in germany is in general quite cumbersome. The IT solutions provided by the government mostly reimplement the offline processes in the online world. I fully agree that this seems ridiculously complex and time-consuming compared to the sleak UX we're accustomed to on the net. However due to the federal structure of germany your experience can vary wildly depending on in which state and city you live. I live in Munich and was recently pleasantly surprised how easy it was to request my postal voting documents for the upcoming elections. Took me only 30 seconds or so :) I think the city council of munich does quite a good job at innovating their IT infrastructure. Most notably the limux project [1] but in other areas like open data and open government as well [2]. Though there is of course still a lot of space for further improvements. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux [2] http://www.it-muenchen-blog.de http://www.it-muenchen-blog.de (german)

danmaz74 13y ago

This is similar enough to experiences I had in Italy. I would have expected Germany to be more advanced in this. I've also been thinking many times how cool it would be if somebody started creating an open source framework for EU e-government, considering that many problems are common to all governments.

chestnut-tree 13y ago
"how cool it would be if somebody started creating an open source framework for EU e-government" I agree this would be brilliant. I know in the UK the gov.uk site is all open source: https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov They recently published a blog post about how the New Zealand Government Online team used some of the gov.uk code. http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/07/26/working-with-govt-nz/ http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/07/26/working-with-... I'd love to see a pan-European initiative to pool resources and knowledge.
- danmaz74 13y ago
  What the UK is doing is commendable - unfortunately, they're also the most unlikely to work at a EU level. What I was thinking about was more of a grass-roots thing, started by hackers who want the e-government to come to the 21st century. Who knows, if my current startup turns out well and I'll have time to think about something different, I could work on that :)
  - benilov 13y ago
    Grassroots sounds nice, but the hard work isn't writing the code - it's convincing those within government that user-centered services and open source are the way to go. I believe that this can only be achieved given a strong mandate, from within government itself.
    - danmaz74 13y ago
      Based on my experience in Italy - with my former employer we did some work with public administrations - my idea would be to start with cash-strapped local administrations and the most forward-looking of their suppliers. These administrations basically have all the same needs, but many of them are served by small suppliers that always have to reinvent the wheel with some half-cooked proprietary solution. If there was a well-designed, free open source GPL solution that already coverered 80% of the requirements, that could give a competitive advantage to those who based their offer on that solution. They would then compete only on service and customization. As I see it, the problem would be mostly to kickstart the development of that GPL platform - no for-profit company could do that, it would be against their interest. But if a big and committed enough community started it, then it could create a positive feedback loop that could be very difficult to stop. IMHO this could be a field where the GPL could give its best (I'm not pasdaran of the GPL, and released my own little open source contributions as MIT).

SchizoDuckie 13y ago

Wow. Sounds like Hotel California...

_quasimodo 13y ago

You should have embedded the scan as an Image into a Word 97 compatible .doc file :)

BjoernKW 13y ago

Even their electronic tax declaration system (which you're required to use as a company in Germany) isn't working properly at times. You should think that - of all things - they should at least get that one right. Germany government IT basically is a joke. Just Google for 'toll collect' for additional hilarity.

brazzy 13y ago
Toll collect is actually working just fine. The original rollout was just a disaster because of a politically driven unrealistic deadline. And that never happens in nongovernment projects, yeah, right...
kybernetyk 13y ago
Heh, our only Windows PC in the office is used just for this. We're otherwise a Mac/Linux shop and the last time I tried filling my (personal) taxes with the Mac it failed horribly. At that time their Java applet wouldn't work with every browser and with the most recent JVM on OS X. So I had to switch through browsers, Google around and downgrade my Java VM. After some tinkering (a lost Saturday) it finally worked but I don't want something like that in my business. That's why we have one PC here :)
- voidiac 13y ago
  Why not run your Windows in a VM and get rid of the PC?

rapala 13y ago

E-government has at least two big problems, and the author faced both of those. First, the users need to be authenticated, as in you are the person you claim to be authenticated. Almost no other web service actually needs to know that. Banks are an other exception and for example here in Finland they provide authentication for other private and government web services. Finland also has those secure chip ID cards the author briefly mentioned. The problem with those is that, at least here in Finland, nobody has them. And most of those who have one, don't own a reader needed to use the chip. The second problem is about logging and archiving. Governments are subject to very strict laws and regulations about how certain cases need to be handled. The are processes to follow. Who did which step when has to be recorded. When the case is finally closed, every piece of paper about the case needs to be archived. Was something denied because a letter from the applicant did not have the necessary information? That letter needs to be archived. All this is manageable when the case is handled in paper. If the case is handled using a web service, things get more complicated. The system has to log all actions done in the case. It has to archive documents in proper ways. That's not impossible. But it is harder than stamping and signing papers for those whose jobs have been about stamping and signing papers for years. It's also harder for those implementing the web service, as most of the strict regulations don't apply in other projects. All this means that big money needs to used for creating something that adds complexity and is not strictly necessary, and oh boy the government likes to skimp on those kind of projects.

jpatokal 13y ago
I'm a little surprised you don't mention Finland's rather effective solution: banks act as an authentication service, so you can log into to your bank to prove who you are, and the bank then redirects you to the original website. As Finland has only half a dozen or so consumer banks, and virtually everybody had an account with one or more, this works quite nicely.
- benilov 13y ago
  The UK is adopting a similar approach: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/01/17/identity-beyond/ http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/01/17/identity-beyo...

Tagedieb 13y ago

Postage is 58 cents. Not the smallest error in the article.

kleiba 13y ago

Yep, sounds like an accurate description. Or at least, it wouldn't surprise me at all to have such an experience. But then again, I think I'd never be so foolish and even _try_ to do something like that online: Germany is easily 10 years behind countries like the U.S., Canada, Australia, etc. If there's a possibility to snail mail something, I'd choose that any time. Or show up in person at the office in question. Not that the latter would be an experience any more pleasant...

sampo 13y ago

Finnish State Railways (www.vr.fi), a monopoly that operates all the trains in Finland, closes their webshop from 1.30am to 4am every night. During the close time you cannot buy train tickets.

Semaphor 13y ago
Used to (I don't know if it still is, I switched banks) be similar for Sparkasse online banking. The website closed some time in the evening and reopened at 6am.
- kybernetyk 13y ago
  Heh, when I was living in Poland for some years the biggest internet bank closed their online banking over the weekend. Well, they didn't close it. They just didn't take orders for wire transfers. Not reading the message that popped up - I assumed it's something along the line of "your order will be filled on monday" - made me miss my first rent payment :3 No idea why they couldn't just queue orders over the weekend. That said: I've seen a lot of IT shit all over the world. No country is immune to stupid people sitting at the steering wheel of IT departments.
  - Semaphor 13y ago
    At least you could access your account, Sparkasse didn't even allow me to log in -.-

Semaphor 13y ago

It is to be expected, after all, the internet is a new thing for all of us according to our chancellor.

vdp 13y ago

Well, at least you have something in Germany. In Bulgaria after 15 years and over half a billion euros spent(and we are talking about one of Europe's poorest countries here) there is almost nothing practically usable done.

D9u 13y ago

I thought that many German municipalities were switching to Linux based systems? Is it not succeeding, or are there other issues? (I don't get out much anymore. I live on a rock in the middle of the Earth's largest ocean, on one of the most isolated land masses on Earth.)

ams6110 13y ago

This sort of stuff is why I still do my 1040 by hand on paper and mail it in. It's just easier.

cLeEOGPw 13y ago

And to top that, German government probably paid millions for anyone who created the system, and since the system crashes so much they now need to pay all the time to keep it running. In my country such projects appear when there is massive corruption at that field.

aaronh 13y ago

Nothing new here. In NY state you have to send in your Article of Organization to the NYS Division of Corps. You then receive a confirmation mailing which you have to turn around and send in to the NYS Dept. of Taxation, so they, you know, know you exist to tax. Durr! The state already knows it exists, it just registered it, why am I playing mailboy and shuffling mail between two departments which are probably within walking distance of each other!

ryanweal 13y ago

This closely resembles my experience getting my business established with Québec. Eventually I sent an email to the helpdesk complaining about all of the issues and in return they sent me an address to an office downtown. That office is the helpdesk and processing center. Since then I go to the office every time, chat with the people, ask questions, fill out my forms, and they process it immediately. It took over one year to finally gain access to all the components of the online system. I still can't read their PDFs because they require an Adobe plugin for PDF "security". At any rate, see if you have the ability to go in person. Helps with the language barrier and probably more effective.