Södertälje will be the place for payment checks

– Södertälje is a municipality that has really excelled in the fight against welfare fraud and there are good experiences there in the practice of cooperation between the authorities, says Finance Minister Michael Damberg (S) as a reason for the government to hold the place as the new place of power.

Försäkringskassan Legal Director Mikael Westberg is now tasked by the government with investigating the formation of the authority, which is expected to be able to start operations on January 1, 2024. For this to be possible, the Riksdag decision is also needed.

Account management

One of the agency’s tasks is to manage a joint transaction account for payments from the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, the Swedish Public Employment Service, the Swedish Pension Agency, CSN and the Swedish Tax Agency, among others. These are payments in the hundreds of billions. The purpose is to make it easier to detect whether a person is receiving double or incorrect compensation.

The authority must also prevent, deter and detect incorrect payments by working with various data reviews and system-wide analytics, Damberg says.

He says investigations have shown that large sums of money are being paid incorrectly or as a result of fraud.

The commission is the result of an investigation that submitted its proposals in the summer of 2020 and proposed that the start take place in the summer of 2022. But the investigator’s task is to seek to start after a year and a half, 2024.

big systems

– It’s a complex job, not only from a legal point of view but also from a technical point of view. We should get a platform that works, it shouldn’t go wrong. Michael Damberg says people depend on these payments.

– It’s the big paid authorities that gather in one system.

When the authority is fully developed, it is estimated that it will have 80 employees.

Before the last elections, the then-S-MP government promised to move a few thousand government jobs from Stockholm and/or arrange them by appointing new authorities in the country. But many of the jobs ended up right near Stockholm.

The aid agency SEDA was due to move to Butkirkka but could not solve the local problem there and ended up in Riesen, north of greater Stockholm. Botkyrka should be satisfied with Fondtorgsnämnden and within a year or so Södertälje will be the home of the paying authority.

However, the Institute for Human Rights, which began operating in January, was set up in Lund.