Bidragsbedrägeri

This thesis treats allowance fraud. Very probably, allowance fraud is frequent and the authorities have difficulty in stopping it. For that reason, it is important to study the area of allowance fraud. The administrative system of sanctions is compared with the penal system of sanctions against different kinds of allowance fraud relating to social welfare, sickness benefit insurance, and housing allowances.

This dissertation focuses on the criminal area, since the applied method of investigating allowance fraud is based on the chapter on fraud under the Swedish Penal Code 9:1. The investigation necessitates a penetrative analysis of the rules of the respective legislation on allowance in order to establish whether the various objective prerequisites are fulfilled. Is the construction of the Swedish Penal Code 9:1 well adapted to allowance fraud? Does the construction serve its purpose concerning cases of fraud other than allowance fraud? In order to be able to answer these questions, an "author-orientated" method is applied.The authors have made many different attempts to interpret the prerequisites of the Swedish Penal Code 9:1. The method bears out that the prerequisities of fraud are quite hard to interpret, but it does not make it clear how this is manifested in examining allowance fraud. The practical application is studied to find out whether there is some difficulty in interpreting the prerequisites and, if so, whether the difficulty in proving fraud is due to deficient information, forms that are hard to understand and/or lack of checking.

The matter of how to proceed to get a satisfactory solution of the stated problems is treated. At this, stress is laid on the distinction between the trial of allowance fraud made by the administrative and criminal authorities, respectively. The problems of application relating to legal measures against allowance fraud in Sweden are studied as well as solutions of these problems in some other countries.

To conclude, it is discussed whether the insertion of a special penalty regulation on allowance fraud would be at variance with modern criminal policy.