German Mail Monitoring to Go Dark for Three Years as Court Ruling Derails Oversight
Published on 07/05/2026 at 11:54 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
Consumers hoping to reroute their letters through the official mail-forwarding service face a price trap: a six-month contract costs €31.90 with Deutsche Post, but shady third-party websites routinely charge over €100 for the same service. An estimated 350,000 such orders are placed annually through these costly platforms, prompting warnings from consumer protection groups and the state criminal police office. Their advice: book only through official channels or in a post office branch.
That consumer advice is especially urgent because the agency responsible for checking whether the mail actually arrives on time has just lost its ability to do so. The Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) admitted it cannot fulfil its legal duty to monitor letter-delivery speeds after losing a case at the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf against a market-research firm. The upshot: independent testing of delivery times – previously conducted with roughly 60,000 test letters a year – will be suspended from 2025 through 2027. A new tender for the control service won't be completed before 2027, meaning systematic checks are unlikely to resume before 2028.
SPP politician Roloff is pushing for an accelerated process. "Transparency about service quality must be restored quickly," he said.
Amid the oversight gap, Deutsche Post insists it is still meeting its legal benchmarks. In 2025, 97.4 percent of letters arrived within three working days, beating the statutory target of 95 percent. For delivery within four days, the company hit exactly 99.0 percent, matching the required figure. Those numbers have slipped slightly from previous years but remain above or at the official thresholds.
Parallel to the quality debate, the economics ministry is planning a tax change that would require DHL Group to charge value-added tax on postal services for business customers. The federal government expects additional annual revenue of about €115 million. The company has pointed to existing European legal provisions that it says govern the matter.
Meanwhile, a separate transparency controversy is brewing. The government is pushing a reform of the Freedom of Information Act (IFG) that would limit request rights to natural persons with a demonstrable legitimate interest. Legal entities, associations and the press would be excluded. The pilots' union Cockpit called the plan "a serious attack on state transparency." President Pinheiro warned: "The principle of unrestricted freedom of information is being turned on its head." Under the reform, fees would also shift to a cost-recovery basis, potentially lifting the current €500 cap and making requests far more expensive. The federal data protection commissioner, Specht-Riemenschneider, has also voiced criticism.
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