I. Is there a national act containing a legal definition of Automated Administrative Decisions?

Digitalisation and artificial intelligence are often described as the “fourth industrial revolution.” They allow public administrations to perform tasks at any time and place through fully or partially automated procedures. Technological progress enables civil servants to concentrate on atypical cases or tasks that require human judgment and empathy, making their duties similar to those of a “process manager.”

By way of introduction, it is worth noting the variety of administrative procedures in the Germany legal system. The General Administrative Procedures Act (Verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz – VwVfG) of 1976 is regarded as a foundational statute for public administration. Nevertheless, it is generally considered incomplete, since it regulates only part of the procedure (for example, the conditions leading to the issue of an administrative act or the stipulation of a public-law agreement). Other issues are regulated by sector-specific laws and by legislation on digitalisation such as the E-Government Act (E-Government-Gesetz, EgovG, 2013), the digitalisation laws at the federal-state level, and the Online Access Act (Onlinezugangsgesetz – OZG, 2017).

The German legislator opted for a basic procedural model (Grundmodell) to avoid overburdening general legislation with references to many different technical areas, while allowing sector-specific legislation to derogate from it as a lex specialis. The legislation on the digitalisation of administrative action had long been awaited by German legal scholars, who had called for a legal framework for administrative digitalisation since the 1950s. In the meantime, the use of technology in public administrations has progressed steadily: in the 1960s, routine mass procedures in financial, social, and personnel management were automated for the first time and proved suitable pioneering fields of application.