The Social Insurance Agency is criticised for having documented verification investigations in relation to assistance payments in a way that hampered the exercising of the right to party insight and that was contrary to the requirements of objectivity and impartiality

Date of decision: 2024-01-03 Decision case number: 4056-2022 Decision maker: Ombudsman

When the Social Insurance Agency received an anonymous complaint against a personal assistant to AA, it initiated, among other things, five different verification investigations, one investigation for each assistant interviewed for the purposes of the investigation. It eventually also began an investigation into AA’s need for a personal assistance. The documentation from one of the interviews was transferred to AA’s case file and shared with her. However, AA’s representative was denied access to the documentation from the other verification investigations.

The interviews had thus been documented but had been inserted into different case files. In the decision, the Parliamentary Ombudsman states that the purpose of the documentation requirement in the Administrative Procedure Act (2017:900) is that the documentation which forms the basis for a decision in a case must be complete, identifiable and easily accessible. In order for these aims not to be lost, there are solid reasons for not splitting up an investigation into a person’s right to certain benefits or the revocation of such benefits. When the documents relating to the same investigation are allocated to several different case files, there is an imminent risk that a party will not be aware of their content, and it may appear as though the authority is withholding the documents.

In the current case, all documentation that could be relevant to the question of AA’s need for assistance should have been included in her case file. As the Social Insurance Agency did not do this immediately, nor when the error was discovered at the time the documentation was requested, it failed to fulfil the documentation requirements laid down in the Administrative Procedure Act, for which the Social Insurance Agency is criticised.