Some shady companies set themselves up as middlemen and pocket a large proportion of the rebate when you can do it yourself in minutes through an online portal.
Having lived in Germany for five years, this is a total myth. The German administration is a tire fire, I mean a filing cabinet fire. First lesson is: learn to wait. Have to do things at the municipality or the Finanzamt? Prepare to reserve 1-2 hours of your day, because you will have to wait a lot. And then the administration is pretty chaotic because (for historical reasons) they do not want to link administrations. Then they do random things like accidentally changing your and your partner's tax brackets in the middle of the year. My wife (who is German) chased them until they would fix it and they had no clue how it happened. Other foreign colleagues often had similar issues.
The same is true by the way with non-government stuff like medical care. Have an appointment with your GP or a medical specialist? Great, the appointment only means that you have to be there at a certain time. They will let you wait an hour or two without any remorse (what's the point of an appointment)?
Nothing is efficient in Germany. Reliability is also a meme at this point. Even 10 years ago, about 1/4-1/2 of the ICE trains I took would have a serious delay (which usually ended being a 2-3 hour delay if you have to cross a border). We just came back from vacation in Germany (it continues to be a beautiful country with nice people) with our electric car. The charging infrastructure is deplorable. Not only they have only a small number of chargers available (even a lot of highway stops only have two chargers), so impossible to charge on a busy day. But not only that, a lot of chargers are broken and nobody really cares for fixing them.
Sorry for the rant. tl;dr: Germany is not efficient and not reliable.
Honestly never seen this issue in any other EU country.
German health system is a mess, but mainly because Germans are (probably rightly) suspicious of having electronic health records.
As a result, German bureaucracy tends to rely solely on paper and in-person appointments. With every state, every city, every office and every employee having their own interpretation of a procesd, you get an unpredictable, opaque, drawn out process that drives people mad.
There is a famous Asterix and Obelix scene about an office that drives people mad with bureaucracy. The protagonists are hunting for the Pass A38. This scene is better known in German than in its original French for a reason.
Perhaps the two are even related. American companies will reach 3 9's of reliability for a device, call it sufficient, and ship a product. German companies will be engaged with not only internal stakeholders, but also various levels of government for weeks to months just to come to an agreement about what the acceptable threshold is (it's the highest asked for by the combined pool of stakeholders), and 18 months after the Americans hit the market, you'll have a wristwatch with 7 9's of reliability that costs 3x as much as the American one.
But fear not, its last disciples will die out soon.
By then we'll be fully digital, hold in check by Electrons bloated thrall, solely.
What a boon.
Schreibtischpingpong where you are the ball being table tennised from desk to desk :)
I never heard 'Büroflipper', which comes to mind when thinking about this. Being the ball in a pin ball machine.
Probably because it's too fast, compared to the latencies in real life. But that would apply to Schreibtischpingpong, too.
For offcice equipment, like fax, phones, copiers, printers...
They were everywhere, around 2000.
Or if spun around, it's incredible what can be done by a single motivated person, and sad that the entire bureaucratic apparatus is incapable of doing it.
In other cases, you pay people to save yourself the hassle of fighting for an appointment slot, and to save a trip across town in the middle of a work day. These fixers become the somewhat digital layer to a famously analog bureaucracy.
That aside, Germany is a federation and every state, city, office and employee adds a layer of variance for a given process.
Austrian ASFINAG would only sell you one that is valid in ~2 week at the earliest, since that’s the time you are guaranteed by law to return it. Not very handy if you are already on the road, and don’t want to stop to buy a physical vignette.