Ulla-Lena Lindqvist has owned her summer cottage in the Vidja area, outside Stockholm, since 2013. A place she describes as her paradise, which In the middle of Stockholm reported on previously.
– I have spent all the summers there, and I have had a very cozy and comfortable time, she says.
With last summer, everything changed.
– I suddenly discovered that I started receiving mail addressed to other people at my address. Then I saw that I had three people written there.
“In the end there were a total of 90 people”
Ulla-Lena Lindqvist called the Swedish Tax Agency, who explained that she would send the mail back to the sender. She also reported the incident to the police. But Lindqvist had to repeat the same procedure over and over because new names kept popping up.
– In the end, there were a total of 90 people who were written on the address.
Ulla-Lena has to call the Swedish Tax Agency every time a new name appears. If she had been written to the address in Vidja, she could have gone to the website and reported every new person. And it is only possible to block the address where you yourself are written.
In the end, Ulla-Lena Lindqvist removed her address from the mailbox – but it didn’t help.
Want authorities to act: Someone should react
In September, the Tax Agency sent out a paper with 88 names. She would tick yes or no for whether the people lived at the address.
– You get mentally tired from this, I can’t bear to go out and watch every week.
She also says that she had plans to sell.
– But at the same time, it’s not me who has done something, it’s others who are doing it.
Now she wants authorities to take this seriously.
– Because I feel that it is something that is very organized. There is also mail from various authorities addressed to all these people. If I return and write that the people don’t live here, someone should react in some way.
The Swedish Tax Agency: Here we have missed
Tobias Wijk, who is an operational expert at the Swedish Tax Agency, says that Ulla-Lena Lindqvist has done exactly the right thing. He explains, however, that the people have not registered at the address but have registered it as a contact address – which means that they want to be able to be reached via the address.
What has made the Tax Agency’s work more difficult is that someone has responded to the mail sent to the address, which shows that communication by post has worked.
– There are 90 people who have left this contact address for her. It is something that we should have reacted to anyway. Is this reasonable?, says Tobias Wijk.
Wijk says that you should return the mail and be clear that it is incorrect information and that the people cannot be reached at the address. Then the Swedish Tax Agency can remove them and sometimes also suspend the coordination number. It sends a signal to authorities to pay extra attention and check the data carefully.
– Here we have missed, she should not have to suffer in that way. We need to improve our handling quite simply, and we are on those kinds of deficiencies.