Germany's SchwarzArbMoDiG Gives Customs AI-Supported Risk Scoring - With a Legal Ban on Automated 'Dangerousness' Verdicts

Germany's customs-run Financial Control of Undeclared Work unit (Finanzkontrolle Schwarzarbeit, FKS) publishes an annual balance of enforcement activity. Its statistics for 2025, released 20 February 2026, recorded 98,200 criminal proceedings and 52,100 administrative proceedings initiated, about 25,800 employer inspections, roughly 675 million euros in identified financial damage, and about 1,200 cumulative years of prison sentences - illustrating the scale of the undeclared-work problem the country is trying to tackle.

On 13 November 2025 the Bundestag passed the Gesetz zur Modernisierung und Digitalisierung der Schwarzarbeitsbekämpfung (SchwarzArbMoDiG), which took effect on 1 January 2026. The law gives the FKS a statutory basis to run automated data analysis and "Künstliche Intelligenz (selbstlernende Systeme)" - self-learning AI systems - that cross-reference records from tax authorities, pension insurance and customs databases, and grants direct electronic access to employers' time-tracking and accounting systems. The reform is backed by roughly 900 additional inspectors.

The law explicitly prohibits these systems from autonomously determining an individual's "dangerousness" - restricting AI to flagging patterns for human inspectors to review rather than letting it make enforcement decisions on its own, a safeguard confirmed by independent legal analysis of the statute.

Because the AI provisions only took legal effect in January 2026, the FKS's most recently published annual statistics (for 2025) still reflect pre-AI operations; no independent evaluation of the new risk-scoring tool's detection accuracy or case yield has yet been published. German digital-rights commentators have also raised concerns about other new surveillance powers, such as wiretap authority, granted in the same legislative package.

Read the full analysis: https://www.zoll.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/Jahresbilanzen/2026/z99_jahresbilanz_fks_2025_gzd.html