Botch. Total botch. With such monster projects, you always do a test run with real data in advance - to avoid exactly these kinds of catastrophes. But these federal bunglers have already shown with other major projects that they might know a thing or two, but they have no clue about IT.
The problem at hand is a banal interface issue that shouldn't have come up at this stage of the project - unless the people implementing it are completely incompetent and stupid.
The original article can be found at heise online news as the original article.