Yesterday I got an alert that I was on the last day to file my taxes (if I didn't want to pay a €25 late-filing fee). On my lunch break I SSO'd into the tax agency website, which showed me a pre-compiled form with all the mortgage payments and medical expenses I'd made during the year already deducted, plus a house renovation expense that was registered but not automatically deducted because the system couldn't automatically determine if it qualified. I didn't have to insert any data, except for updating my email address as it still had my old GMail one. I saved it and submitted the tax form as-is, just in case.

Later that evening, I googled around a bit and determined that the renovation work did indeed qualify for the deduction. I reopened the website, clicked on 'Submit Corrective Tax Form' and entered the expense amount. I needed to provide the cadastral reference IDs for the renovated building/s, so I opened my tax agency home page -> Cadastral Query and copy-pasted them from it. Five minutes later I had submitted the second tax form and had two copies in my inbox: one in PDF, and one in RPF (its native columnar file format, in case I wanted to edit it later with a Java desktop application).

Here's the thing, though:

As little as five years ago, all of that would have required me to personally keep a bunch of paper trails and most likely professional help. "Cadastral query" was a by-word for "ponderous bureaucratic mess" and the practical advice was to start filing your taxes at least a couple months in advance.

However, once public-services SSO ("SPID") was introduced in 2015, it enabled a cascade of formerly in-person services to go full digital relatively quickly, because the most critical hard part - authn/authz - was solved. I think Germany should be perfectly able to shake off its dead-tree culture if it clears the same hurdle.