The Constitutional Court of Schleswig-Holstein has declared the Land's municipal financial equalisation scheme (KFA) unconstitutional in one important respect. Schleswig-Holstein had fundamentally reformed its KFA, which had previously been unconstitutional in many parts, in 2020 on the basis of a FiFo-GGR report. The reform was needed in order to meet the high standard of actual needs-based funding. However, in the financing of central functions, the KFA 2020 resorted to the old solution instead of taking into account the empirical results of FiFo and GGR. According to the current decision, the legislator ought not to have ignored this new scientific "standard of comparison". Here, legal amendments have to be implemented. "Of course, parliaments do not have to adhere to expert recommendations in every detail," states Michael Thöne, "but in the fair allocation of scarce resources according to actual needs, there is little room for political manoeuvring.“

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