Swedish news, week 45 in 2025
Immigration news
Some of the Migrationsverket's services will now be available at the Statens servicecenter servicekontor and not their own offices. These servicekontor are those places where Skatteverket, Försäkringskassan, and possibly other agencies are all sitting under one roof.
This means that starting in 2026 you should be paying extra attention when getting an invite or booking an in-person visit with Migrationsverket, as it might be not the same address as you went to last time. They'll be closing down the drop-in services in favor of phone and email support in Boden, Göteborg, Malmö, Norrköping, Stockholm/Sundbyberg, Uppsala, Växjö, Västerås, Umeå, Sundsvall, and Örebro. The link below has the list of the 35 servicekontor that are going to be offering part of Migrationsverket's services starting in 2026.
Consumer news
If you bought ground meat from Willys or Hemköp recently, specifically with the batch number 5281041084, you might wanna not eat it (or at the very least get it hotter than 72°C to kill the salmonella that might be in it).
Axfood
And if you got a “lasagna in a glass jar” with best before date 25.07.2027 for your baby, it might contain small bits of plastic. Watch out.
Reports and data
ISF (Inspektionen för socialförsäkringen, The Social Insurance Inspectorate — a government agency) has published a report about Försäkringskassan's reclaiming of sickness and parental benefits, i.e. cases when Försäkringskassan demanded the money back. It's 172 pages of “this is wrong, and that is wrong, and also that, very wrong”: turns out there was at least one legal deficiency in 59% of the inspected 202 cases. The deficiencies vary: it can for example be assessments not being legally substantiated or lack of documentation for the decision. The inspectors have seen a particularly high number of deficiencies in assessing if a payment was incorrect at all, which is kinda the crucial first step when it comes to demanding it back. In 54% of the cases there was no clear justification for why a payment was deemed incorrect, or what error the individual is alleged to have made, which makes it harder for them to e.g. decide whether they should make an appeal.
74% of all cases of reclaiming sickness benefits had at least one legal deficiency. For parental benefits, it was 45%. In 9% of all the cases there were typos or self-contradictions in the decision's justification (the typos in question could be e.g. the wrong date of the supposedly incorrect payment). The statistics about incorrent payments are affected by all of this, so the inspectors write that the proportion of incorrect payments caused by FK itself is higher than it reports: 21% (and not 7% like it says) in the parental benefits cases and 34% (not 17%) for the sickness benefits ones. It goes on and on. I guess the lesson here is, if you get an återkrav from Försäkringskassan and it doesn't make sense to you, you're far from alone, and it might be a good idea to contact them and/or a lawyer.
At the fika, you might hear about...
Kladdkaka day! Kladdkaka is a chocolate cake that's crispy on the outside and sticky/molten/gooey on the inside. It's celebrated on the 7th of November. Although it's not a long tradition, it's a sweet one. And here's a meme about it, courtesy of r/Sweden:
