Meeting at Meseberg Castle since Sunday 27 August, the German government announced, on Wednesday 30 August, that it wanted to give impetus to a European initiative to reduce administrative burdens. It has thus adopted a document that should serve as a basis for future negotiations at European level, according to the press release issued by the Ministry of the Economy and Climate Protection and the Ministry of Justice.
“The origin of the bureaucratic burn-out in our companies is not only at national level. It is also fed by the European level. It is therefore logical that we should also look at the European level to support our national efforts”, explained Marco Buschmann, the Federal Minister of Justice. “What makes Europe strong, we keep; what weakens Europe, we do away with”, he added.
In his view, this reduction in bureaucracy would not only generate “a growth spurt at zero cost for the whole of Europe”, but would also increase its attractiveness and competitiveness.
The German ministers urged better application of existing instruments for better regulation and systematic impact assessments. In the document, they also suggested drawing up an inventory of the costs of bureaucracy at European level. “Following the example of the German model, a bureaucracy cost index could be introduced to show how costs change over time”, it adds.
Another key measure is to extend, at European level, the European definition of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to include an additional category of company, the ‘small mid-caps’, with between 250 and 500 employees. The creation of this category would be accompanied by a re-examination of the financial thresholds in the definition of SMEs.
In addition, the document stipulates that reporting obligations should be reduced to the minimum necessary and, in particular, duplicate reporting obligations should be eliminated. The progress of digitalisation is also mentioned. The document suggests systematically subjecting new European legislation to effective digital controls in order to improve the quality of legislation at EU level.
The federal government said its initiative was supported by the French government, and the two countries should coordinate with a view to a European initiative to cut red tape.
This initiative resonates with the announcement made by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in mid-March at the European Parliament, concerning proposals to simplify and reduce reporting requirements by 25% (see EUROPE 13154/16).
This announcement has already had an impact on the first ‘ESRS’ (‘European Sustainability Reporting Standards’) for corporate extra-financial reporting, whose delegated act has yet to be approved by the co-legislators (see EUROPE 13234/16). (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)