BERLIN: A man in Germany received 1,700 copies of a letter from the tax office.
His application to access the government's platform for paperless electronic tax returns was made during the last weekend of October, when clocks were set back an hour, a spokeswoman for the Finance Ministry said on Tuesday.
She said the application "was caught in a sort of time loop" due to a technical glitch triggered by the time change.
The mountain of letters was delivered to the man in the town of Quickborn, north of Hamburg, on Saturday.
"At first I was really shocked," the Flensburger Tageblatt newspaper quoted him as saying.
"At the tax office, you don't expect a mistake. You tend to think you've messed up yourself."
When he opened the letter, he found a secret code that allowed him to gain access to the electronic platform. All 1,700 letters contained the exact same document.
The Ministry of Finance said it has already contacted the man to apologise.
"Of course, the collection and destruction of the excess mail was also offered," said the spokeswoman.
She said the request the man had made is processed fully automatically and without human oversight. – dpa
