Crushing report on the NAV scandal: – The main responsibility lies with NAV and the ministry – VG

The committee criticizes all the bodies involved in the case.

– The main responsibility lies with NAV and the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, says committee leader Finn Arnesen, who emphasizes that the case could have looked completely different if only one of the bodies had seen the error.

Arnesen adds that the report is not unanimous: The majority believes that the law in the area has been the same since 1994. The minority has a different view, and sees 2012 as an important time in this case.

In the report’s conclusion, the committee writes, among other things, the following: «Absence of critical thinking, good organization, and behavior in accordance with the responsibilities of the various bodies, has meant that the significance of EEA law has been in the blind spot for almost everyone involved. The result is that individuals have been unjustly stopped benefits, received demands for reimbursement of social security, been labeled as social security abusers, and have also been sentenced to prison on incorrect grounds “.

– It is a system failure where almost all agencies have failed in this area. As chief political leader, I will make an unreserved apology to everyone involved, says Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Torbjørn Røe Isaksen.

A year later

It is almost a year since it first became known to NAV and the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs that social security recipients may for years have been wrongly convicted of social security fraud. The investigative committee that was set up to investigate the case has been working on it since November.

The leader of the committee, law professor Finn Arnesen, had said in advance that there would be an explanation as to why the mispractice took place, and why it took so long.

– Our investigations show that there are not many who have anything special to be proud of in this case, Arnesen told NTB on Friday.

When the committee submitted its first interim report in March, they concluded that it did not look at the period after the new Social Security Regulation was introduced in 2012. EFTA’s control body, ESA, has warned that the malpractice could potentially go all the way back to 1 January. 1994, when the EEA Agreement entered into force.

Read the whole story: The NAV scandal

So far, 1,643 people have been affected by the misinterpretation. In addition, around 3,000 have received incorrect rejections of social security applications.

VG updates the case.