Jürgen Volkert Governmental Poverty and Wealth Reporting based on the Capability Approach Martha Nussbaum (2000) has emphasized the important role of an official adoption of CA-applications by national governments to avoid Capability Approach implementation strategies that bypass the deliberations of a demo- cratically elected parliament. In this context it is promising to further investi- gate the official Poverty and Wealth Reporting system of the German govern- ment (2005) that has adopted Amartya Sens Capability Approach as a theore- tical foundation for the reporting. The government is assigned by the German Federal Parliament to triennially monitor and publish the situation and deve- lopment regarding poverty and wealth in reports that also have to be approved by the parliament. The aims of this paper are to provide a brief overview of the theoretical framework and implementation of the German reporting system. Moreover, potential value added and challenges of this monitoring are discussed, also by briefly comparing it with the Capability Approach based Equality and Human Rights Monitoring of the British Government that has recently been established. 1. The Official German Poverty and Wealth Reporting System 1.1 Background and goals Until the mid-1990s the German government did not acknowledge poverty as a relevant issue for a rich country like Germany. 1 However, following the elections of the Federal Government in 1998, the new government coalition decided to implement a Poverty and Wealth Reporting System including triennial official reports and delegated the responsibility for this to the Fede- ral Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. The goals of the reporting process have included since then: 1 A more detailed discussion of strands of arguments and drivers of the re-orientation is given in Arndt and Volkert (2011).