The motivation – challenge – solution , Date: 11/11/2025, format: Article, area: Authority

The asylum procedure in the Federal Republic of Germany requires close cooperation between various authorities at the federal, state and local levels. Overall, this presents a picture of a complex system of communication relationships between the authorities involved in the asylum procedure. For these authorities to work together efficiently, it is es-sential that they are able to exchange various types of information and data reliably.

The existing process landscape of the authorities involved is often heterogeneous and limited in its performance potential due to historically evolved structures, media discontinuities and human interfaces. A further challenge in the exchange of information and data is that the authorities involved rely on their own specialist applications to perform their tasks within their own areas of responsibility. These specialist applications are generally only able to “communicate” with each other and exchange data to a limited extent.

The BAMF and its partner authorities are attempting to counter these challenges with various comprehensive IT solutions and standards so as to improve the level of digitalisation in the German public sector. These include, for example, the Central Register of Foreign Nationals (Ausländerzentralregister, AZR) as a common central database for storing specific master data and documents, and the XAusländer standard as a means of mutual exchange for standardised messages.

However, there has so far been no comprehensive IT solution for coordinating the joint asylum procedure at the individual BAMF locations. Instead, there were individual communication processes and procedures at each location. These frequently involved the exchange of paper documents or lists via email. However, these make the joint process on site cumber-some, timeconsuming and prone to errors.

A standardised and automated process landscape for coordinating the asylum procedure between the BAMF and the federal states would, fundamentally, offer the greatest potential for simplifying/accelerating the asylum procedure. However, such concepts require auto-mated workflow management to be implemented uniformly across the German administrative landscape. Yet the high degree of standardisation stands in direct contrast to the legally established federal distribution of responsibilities and competences and would potentially enable cross-organisational monitoring. A blockchain-based architecture approach combines the advantages of decentralised data storage with a high level of data and transaction secu-rity, making it an attractive and innovative solution for a federal-state-wide IT application.

The current development of a programming interface is intended to support inter-agency communi-cation and cooperation through the exchange of information on the status of asylum procedures and enable the federal states to map their own processes in their state-specific applications. In addition, the BAMF is focusing on harmonising the various IT and process landscapes at the locations through a federal asylum blockchain infrastructure (FLORA) and a FLORA-based support system, which does not replace existing systems but brings them together within a kind of technological framework.