Originally Posted by
Chuvash
But I don’t understand how they can verify whether you’re actually going on a business trip or not.
if you’re self employed/senior exec you can just make up any sort of business meeting and have a letter to support it.
if you’re employed you can make a “job interview” letter: that’s still a professional reason.
what are they going to do beyond calling the number of the letter?
I highly doubt they would go as far as calling the number or verifying that the business you are visiting actually exists. It's not an IRS audit.
I'm not sure it's worth trying to figure out the logic behind all these self-certifications. Same as for the once-per-day, one-kilometer-away trips out of home which are self-certified and super-easy to abuse once you realize which box to check and how to play along with the ever-changing rules.
Yes, millions of people were caught with "invalid" certificates and fined during the first lockdown, and more will probably be fined in November. My guess is that they either mindlessly filled their certificate and made obvious mistakes, or just didn't get that there are ways to basically move around 100% legally during lockdown.
If you are a business owner, you can probably make any kind of business-related invitation appear. If you are employed, as you said a "job interview invitation" letter might be enough.
As of today I'd say the difficulty is only knowing which kind of documents (and underlying travel reasons) are actually considered valid. It's a bit of a gamble as there never was an official statement about it. But once we know which ones are OK... Being allowed to travel will only be as hard as having a printer and a piece of paper.