Ex-post control Unfortunately, it is still unclear when the AOB’s recommendations will be implemented in full. However, in the meantime the understanding that a uniform handling of diacritic characters would be desirable for interoperability and/or cost reduction reasons alone has spread across nearly all areas of administration. But the need to adapt a number of Austrian e-government applications to deal with diacritic characters is nevertheless an extensive project. The Federal Ministry of Finance is now able to reproduce names to the letter. IT processes applied by the Federal Ministry of Finance must support the input, processing and output of Unicode to handle diacritic characters in the names of individuals, addresses and the names of legal entities based on the convention on “Diacritic characters”. If individual software is developed, the software library “Diacritic characters” must be used. The Federal Ministry of Finance has obtained a federal license for this library. The software library “Diacritic characters” comprises the transformation, verification, presentation and input of diacritic characters (in an input screen). Substantial progress can be seen The SAP process at the Federal Ministry of Finance (federal budget and personnel management) has already been converted to Unicode and can therefore process diacritic characters. Tax and customs applications are currently being converted for use with diacritic characters as part of the program E-Finance Tax and Customs. April 2014 has been set as the planned completion date for this IT process. Individual case: VA-BD-BKA/0026-A/1/2009 AOB criticizes excessive duration of proceedings by the Austrian Data Protection Commission The AOB believes that a duration of nearly two years for monitoring and ombudsman proceedings by the Austrian Data Protection Commission must be classed as an administration deficit. In its Annual Report of 2010 and in its Annual Report of 2012 the AOB already criticised the excessive duration of proceedings by the Austrian Data Protection Commission. Cases during the reporting year demonstrate that the measures promised by the Data Protection Commission are apparently not yet sufficient for ensuring swift processing of all notifications received. Long duration of proceedings The AOB identified that an investigation under Section 30 of the Federal Act concerning the Protection of Personal Data 2000 starting in March 2011 was only completed with a notification dated February 2013. This duration of nearly two years led the AOB to identify a case of maladministration. This is the case not least because the Data Protection Commission failed to take any action between May 2011 and January 2012. Case of maladministration 41