After several postponements, an electronic query has replaced paper certificates of incapacity for work (sick notes / “yellow slips”) issued by doctors in Germany since January 2023. This is the so-called electronic certificate of incapacity for work — eAU or eAttest for short.
We followed the development closely for months and continuously evaluated how to integrate the eAttest query into Timebutler. After an in-depth review of the options and requirements set by the legislator, and intensive exchange with the responsible bodies, we decided not to offer eAttest retrieval in Timebutler for the time being. The many reasons for this — which also serve the interests of Timebutler users — are explained further down this page.
How can you retrieve the eAttest?
As explained above, Timebutler does not support eAttest retrieval. Instead, you have the following options.
1) Not necessary in many cases
The responsible bodies have stated that in most cases, retrieving the eAttest is not necessary. If your company trusts the employee’s sick report, or if the document is not relevant for payment, you do not need to retrieve the eAttest.
2) Payroll program
Since 2022, all certified payroll programs are legally required to offer a way to query eAttests. Your company or your tax advisor uses a payroll program where eAttests can be retrieved. Speak to your payroll department or tax advisor about this.
3) sv.net form assistant
At www.itsg.de/produkte/sv-net/, ITSG GmbH (the service centre of the statutory health insurers) offers a way to retrieve eAttests online. However, this is only practical for small companies without a payroll program: you have to re-enter all employee data with every query, so the form assistant offers little convenience for recurring requests.
How can you record in Timebutler that the certificate is on file?
In Timebutler, you can set for each sick report whether the certificate has been received by the company. This has always been possible and does not change with the introduction of the eAttest — especially since many employees will not have an eAttest, and the previous procedure using paper certificates remains in place.
As soon as the doctor’s certificate reaches the company in paper form or as an eAttest, you can mark the sick report in Timebutler as having a certificate on file. Read here how to change the certificate status of a sick report.
Read here how to record additional sick leave information — for example, whether a doctor issued an eAttest for a sick report.
Why we don’t offer eAttest retrieval
In short:
- The official procedure does not allow convenient, real-time retrieval of the data.
- Requirements for data provision force companies to enter the same data multiple times and to use cumbersome transmission channels.
- Many employees are excluded from eAttest retrieval, so paper certificates still have to be processed.
- Improper queries are unlawful — we want to protect our customers from this.
- Offering the query would require a complex, labour-intensive identification process for companies within Timebutler.
The detailed reasons follow below.
Not convenient
Several restrictions in the retrieval procedure make the eAttest query inconvenient.
No real-time availability
When an employee has seen a doctor and a certificate has been issued, they inform the company. Today’s electronic transmission methods create the expectation that the eAttest is available for retrieval immediately or within a few minutes. In practice, when the company queries the eAttest, the reporting office will often respond that no eAttest is available. In most cases, an eAttest is not retrievable until days after the doctor’s visit — frequently only 4–6 days after the sick report.
Duplicate data entry and laborious reconciliation
The procedure requires personnel data (employee name, health insurer, and others) to be transferred from a certified payroll system to the target system. Timebutler already holds this information, but you explicitly may 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 rework the exported data before importing it — a task that typically only experienced IT staff can do.
This manual export and import would have to be repeated before every eAttest retrieval to ensure the procedure meets legal requirements. That is not reasonable to expect from users.
The exact same data is already present in Timebutler, but you may not use it. Transferring the data from a payroll system is mandatory regardless of what is 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 the data and keep it up to date.
Risk of violating legal requirements
You may only retrieve an eAttest if an employee has reported sick beforehand and the company has been informed. This has the following consequences.
Access may be blocked
If companies knowingly or accidentally perform eAttest queries in Timebutler without a prior sick report, the reporting office could block Timebutler’s access to eAttest retrieval for all users due to too many unjustified requests. Software cannot guarantee with absolute certainty whether an employee may have already reported sick by phone or email before the company triggers the query.
This means there is a real risk that access to eAttest retrieval could be revoked. Under these conditions, we cannot ensure that eAttest retrieval remains permanently available.
No automatic provision possible
Our preferred scenario would have been for Timebutler to provide companies with their eAttests automatically. For this, Timebutler would need to query all open eAttests for the companies, so that the list of retrievable eAttests could be presented to users as soon as they log in.
However, this is not permitted. Only targeted queries for individual employees on specific dates are allowed, and only on the condition that the employee has reported the illness beforehand.
Not comprehensive — paper certificates continue to exist
The switch to the eAttest does not apply to all employee groups. For example, no eAttests will be issued for the large group of privately insured employees — instead, eAttests and the familiar paper certificates will run in parallel.
In individual cases, doctors’ practices will not issue an eAttest even for eligible employees — for example, in the event of a technical malfunction, a missing digital signature, or one that has not been renewed. In this case, the employee receives a paper certificate that must be sent to the health insurer. If the employee fails to do so, no eAttest is created for that illness and it will never be retrievable.
Risk of violating data protection
To prevent unauthorised parties from querying sensitive personal health data, the querying system must provide written assurance that its users “have identified themselves to the reporting office or its contractors.” Meeting this requirement involves extensive specifications from the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
To meet these requirements, companies would need to undergo an extensive, time-consuming identification process, including verification of their authorisation to access certain data. This identification must also be confirmed and repeated regularly. At the time of the eAttest’s introduction, the BSI document describing the identification requirements was 60 pages long.
While it would be possible to set up such an identification process, it would involve considerable effort for companies. Even then, Timebutler would still have no complete assurance that, in individual cases, unauthorised health data of employees from third-party companies would not be queried — or that the Timebutler query would not be misused for this purpose. Such violations could have legal consequences for both Timebutler and the companies involved. We want to protect our customers and Timebutler from this.
Technical complexity and interface changes
At the time of the eAttest’s introduction, around 30 endpoints (health insurers) on the receiving end use partly different encryption methods. In some cases, the interface specifications also differ, and experience from other companies shows that eAttest queries sometimes require manual rework.
Implementing eAttest retrieval involves several audits and the fulfilment of an extensive specification — at the time of the eAttest’s introduction, this comprised 100 criteria, with further criteria to be added. In addition to the system audit, an initial system examination must demonstrate the correctness and practicality of the retrieval through pilot tests at at least two different employers within nine months of the system audit being completed. The prescribed certification process therefore takes at least 9 months, and realistically additional lead time has to be planned.
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 adapt the system, and to have the changes tested and certified. If these timeframes are missed, the certification can be revoked, suddenly making eAttest retrieval impossible.
Under these conditions, we cannot ensure that eAttest retrieval remains permanently available.
No real-time query
As described above, eAttests are typically only ready for retrieval 4–6 days after the sick report. In addition, queries are only permitted if the company has submitted a report beforehand. Automatic provision by Timebutler, as we would have liked, is therefore not allowed and not possible.
The eAttest query interface may also only be called a maximum of 4 times per hour. Companies therefore cannot retrieve the eAttest immediately and may have to observe a waiting time of up to 15 minutes.
Note: The electronic certificate of incapacity for work (eAU/eAttest) is a German-specific procedure under German social insurance law and applies only to companies operating in Germany. Comparable electronic sick-note systems exist in some other countries, but the legal classification, retrieval procedure, and certification requirements described here are specific to the German system.