– It is extremely unfortunate, says Gabor Sebastiani, digital risk officer at the Swedish Employment Agency to SVT.
Last autumn, several inaccuracies were discovered in the Employment Service’s address register. Among other things, people whose country of birth should be “Ukraine” had received the country “UK” – i.e. Great Britain. Apartment numbers had been lost and street names had been registered twice.
An internal review also showed that so-called privacy markings had disappeared. A person with protected information had, contrary to procedures, received a letter with an invitation to a job fair, and two protected social security numbers had been made visible to external actors.
Thousands of letters had also been sent out to addresses that could be incorrect.
Can miss cheats
In addition to the risk of people with protected information being exposed, there was also a risk of missing out on fraud where people who had left the country continued to withdraw A-kassa – and also that people who did the right thing received sanctions because their official address was wrong.
The employment agency introduced a new routine with manual checks while the error was located and rectified.
The extra checks were completed at the turn of the year, but have now had to be resumed, after random samples found several new errors – which this time can be linked to the Employment Service’s own system. Ten incidents have been discovered, of which at least one was a missed privacy flag.
“There is a temporary solution, but there is a risk that we disclosed protected personal data for a few job seekers,” says an article on the authority’s intranet, where it also appears that the Arbetsförmedlingen’s IT department is now working to find the cause of the error.
Reasons for self-criticism
Gabor Sebastiani states that they have not yet seen any increase in return mail or complaints, i.e. people contacted because they thought they had received incorrect sanctions, but still sees reason for self-criticism.
– The biggest disappointment is that it takes an incredibly long time.