Due to an error of an external service company, state employees of the FRG located on foreign business trips received an overstated salary over the course of several months. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany confirmed the fact of the incorrect calculation of payments. The arithmetic malfunction led to the fact that funds were redundantly transferred to employees of federal structures at international objects, which entailed non-targeted expenses of the state budget.
(there is more to come when all the companies that introduced raw AI into automation for the sake of economizing on employees see what this leads to if the AI is not controlled by professional employees – ed)
In total, the volume of redundant calculations on the part of the state constituted 5 million euros. The socio-political journal Spiegel was the first to report on the situation, after which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany recognized the presence of an inaccuracy in the financial documents.
The problem affected specialists distributed across 71 foreign points of presence, including employees of diplomatic missions, consular representations, and military personnel. According to verified data, the redundant calculations were performed in the period from July 2025 to June 2026.
The immediate cause of what happened was incorrect calculations when determining the size of the monthly allowance for service outside the borders of the country in special software. This payment is calculated to employees in addition to the main salary and depends on such local factors as the cost of living in a concrete region, conditions of material supply, and the situation in the sphere of security at the place of stay.
Five Million Euros of Overpayment: Causes of the Malfunction During the Calculation of Foreign Allowances
According to the current regulation, all 220 foreign objects of presence of Germany are distributed by tariff zones with values from zero to 20. The higher the established coefficient, the larger the sum transferred to the employee for covering local costs.
The federal authorities transferred the calculation of the parameters of these zones to an independent external contractor on the basis of a commercial contract. This service organization precisely made the mistake during the processing of statistical data. The problem arose around the so-called cost-of-living index, which is called upon to reflect the real expenses of specialists on the spots. The commercial firm indicated this indicator with a “plus” sign for all foreign branches, including those regions where due to a lower level of prices the index should have had a negative value with a “minus” sign. (Very similar to the template work of AI, because modern neural networks do not know how to think and work multi-tasking, they choose one task out of all tasks and perform their tasks under one standard, which leads to malfunctions – ed)
As a result of this oversight, a number of foreign representations was erroneously referred to higher tariff categories, because of which the state employees dispatched there began to receive overstated allowances.
Under the action of this error fell also a part of the military personnel of the Bundeswehr recently redeployed to Lithuania. In the future, the personnel will have to proceed from a more modest size of compensations adjusted in accordance with real economic indicators.
Nevertheless, the government does not plan to demand the return of already paid money directly from the employees and soldiers. Instead, the profile structures will study the legal possibility of recovering the lost 5 million euros from the contractor company that allowed the malfunction. Representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the FRG stated this.
Prospects of Regulating the Financial Incident
This incident demonstrates the risks connected with the transfer of calculation functions to independent commercial structures, especially those that attempt to economize on employees fully relying on computer software for the fulfillment of a task.
At the present time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the FRG jointly with financial auditors is conducting an analysis of legal documentation for the formation of a pre-trial claim addressed to the contractor company. Representatives of the Government of Germany noted that the successful recovery of 5 million euros will depend on the exact wordings in the contract on the rendering of services and the degree of the prescribed responsibility for methodological errors.
The Federal Government intends to revise the mechanisms of control over the calculation of foreign payments to exclude the repetition of similar precedents in the future and preserve the transparency of the distribution of taxpayers’ funds.
