After several postponements, as of January 2023 doctors’ paper certificates of incapacity for work (notes/“yellow slips”) in Germany have been replaced by an electronic query, the so‑called electronic certificate of incapacity for work, also called eAU or eAttest.
We closely observed the development for months and continuously evaluated how to integrate the eAttest query into Timebutler. After an in-depth review of the options and requirements provided by the legislator and intensive exchange with the responsible bodies, we decided to not offer eAttest retrieval in Timebutler until further notice. You can read the many reasons for this, which are also in the interest of Timebutler users, further down on this page.
How can you retrieve the eAttest?
As described above, for many reasons Timebutler does not plan to support eAttest retrieval. Instead, you have the following options:
1) Not necessary in many cases
The responsible bodies have informed that in most cases it is not necessary to collect the eAttest. If the employer trusts the employee’s sick note or if it is not a document that triggers payment, it is not necessary to collect the eAttest.
2) Payroll program
Since 2022, all certified payroll programs have been legally required to provide a way to query eAttests. Your company or your tax advisor uses a payroll program where you can retrieve eAttests. Talk to your payroll department or tax advisor about this.
3) sv.net form assistant
At www.itsg.de/produkte/sv-net/, ITSG GmbH (service center of the statutory health insurers) offers a way to retrieve eAttests online. However, this only makes sense for small companies without a payroll program, because with every query you must re-enter all employee data and the form assistant therefore offers little convenience for recurring queries.
How can you record in Timebutler that the certificate is on file?
In Timebutler you can set for each sickness entry whether the certificate has been received by the employer or not. This has always been possible and that does not change with the introduction of the eAttest — especially since many employees will not use the eAttest and the old procedure with paper certificates will remain in place.
As soon as the doctor’s certificate in paper form or the eAttest reaches the employer, you can set in the sickness entry in Timebutler that the certificate has been received. Read here how to [change the certificate status for a sickness entry(/absence-management/sick-leave/medical-certificate-status-in-sickness-entries/).
Read here how you can set [additional sickness information(/frequently-asked-questions/vacation-and-absences/additional-information-for-the-e-au/), for example whether a doctor issued an eAttest for a sickness entry.
What are the reasons against querying the eAttest in Timebutler?
The short answer to this question is:
- The provided procedure for querying eAttests does not allow you to retrieve and provide the desired data conveniently and in real time.
- There are requirements for how companies must provide the data that lead to multiple entry of the same data and only allow transmission via complicated channels.
- Many employees are excluded from eAttest retrieval, so you must continue to process paper certificates.
- Misusing the queries is illegal - we want to protect our customers from that.
- Offering the query would force a labor-intensive and complicated company identification process within Timebutler.
Click here to read the detailed answer.
The detailed answer to this question is:
Not convenient
Several restrictions in the procedure for collecting the eAttest make retrieval not very convenient, as follows:
No real-time availability
When an employee has seen a doctor and a certificate has been issued there, the employee informs the employer. The expectation today, with electronic transmission options, is that the eAttest is available for retrieval immediately or within a few minutes. The employer then queries the eAttest. Unfortunately, the reporting office will respond that no eAttest is available. In most cases an eAttest will not be retrievable until days after the doctor’s visit, often only 4–6 days after the sick note.
Duplicate data entry, laborious reconciliation
To retrieve eAttests, the procedure requires that personnel data (employee name, health insurer, and others) be transferred from a certified payroll system to the target system. Timebutler already holds this information. However, you must explicitly not use it. Instead, you would have to export the data from certified payroll software and import it into Timebutler. Because payroll products have no common specification for data exchange, companies would have to painstakingly convert or revise the exported data to import it into Timebutler. In most cases, only experienced IT staff can reasonably do that.
You would have to perform this manual export and import of data before every eAttest retrieval to ensure the procedure meets legal requirements. That is not convenient for users — more precisely, it is an unreasonable, large effort.
The exact same data that must be imported is already present in Timebutler, but you must not use it. Transferring the data from a payroll system is mandatory regardless of data already in place.
In addition, the company must ensure that the data comes from a so-called system-tested payroll program and is imported unchanged. You must continuously verify and keep the data up to date.
Risk of violating legal requirements
According to legal requirements, you may only retrieve an eAttest if an employee reported sick beforehand and the employer was informed. This implies:
Access may be blocked
If some companies knowingly or accidentally perform eAttest queries in Timebutler without a prior sick report, Timebutler could have its access to eAttest retrieval blocked for all users due to too many unjustified requests. However, software cannot guarantee with absolute certainty that an employee might have reported sick beforehand by phone or email before the company triggers the eAttest query.
There would therefore be a risk that access to eAttest retrieval would be denied. Under these conditions, we cannot ensure that eAttest retrieval remains available permanently.
No automatic provision possible
Our desired scenario would have been for Timebutler to automatically provide companies with the eAttests. To do this, Timebutler would have to be able to query all open eAttests for the companies. We could then already offer our users the list of retrievable eAttests when they log in to Timebutler.
However, that is not permitted — only targeted queries for individual employees for specific dates are allowed, and only on the condition that the employee reported the illness beforehand.
Not comprehensive - Paper certificates continue to exist
The switch to the eAttest will not apply to all employee groups. For example, there will be no eAttests for the large group of privately insured employees; instead there will be parallel operation of eAttests and the familiar paper certificates.
In individual cases, the eAttest will not be issued even for eligible employees, for example if there is a technical malfunction in a doctor’s practice or a so-called digital signature is missing or has not been renewed. In this case, the employee will still receive a paper certificate that must be sent to the health insurer. If the employee fails to do so, the eAttest for that illness can never be issued and will never be retrievable.
Risk of violating data protection
To prevent sensitive, personal health data from being queried by arbitrary parties, the querying system must provide written assurance that the system’s users “have identified themselves to the reporting office or its contractors.” To guarantee this, you must meet extensive requirements of the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
To meet these requirements, companies would need to undergo an extensive and time-consuming identification process, including verification of authorization to access certain data. You must also ensure and therefore repeat this identification regularly. At the time of the eAttest introduction, the BSI document describing the identification requirements is 60 pages long.
While it would be possible to set up such an identification process, it would entail considerable effort for companies, and Timebutler would still not have complete assurance that, in individual cases, unauthorized health data of employees from third-party companies would not be queried and that the Timebutler query would not be abused for that. Such violations could lead to legal consequences for both Timebutler and the companies. We want to protect our customers and Timebutler from this.
Technical complexity and interface changes
On the opposite side of the eAttest query there are about 30 endpoints (health insurers) at the time of the eAttest introduction, some of which use different encryption methods. In some cases, the interface specifications also differ, and other companies report that eAttest queries sometimes require manual rework.
Implementing eAttest retrieval involves several audits and meeting extensive specification requirements, which at the time of the eAttest introduction comprise 100 criteria and are to be supplemented with further criteria. In addition to the system audit, during an initial system examination you must prove the correctness and practicality of the retrieval through pilot tests at least two different employers within nine months of completion of the system audit. The prescribed certification process therefore takes at least 9 months; realistically, you must plan additional lead time.
There are also legal requirements regarding versioning. When changes to the eAttest retrieval requirements are defined, querying systems have only a very limited timeframe to promptly adapt the system to the new requirements and have the changes tested and certified. If these timeframes are not met, certification can be revoked, suddenly making eAttest retrieval impossible.
Under these conditions, we cannot ensure that eAttest retrieval remains available permanently.
No real-time query
As described above, eAttests will presumably be ready for retrieval only 4–6 days after the sick note. In addition, queries may only take place if the employer submitted a report beforehand. Automatic provision by Timebutler, as we would have liked, is therefore not permitted and thus not possible.
In addition, you may call the eAttest query interface only a maximum of 4 x per hour. Companies therefore could not query the eAttest immediately; they would have to observe a waiting time of up to 15 minutes.