Incompetence

The comic duo of Puke & Snot that is the main attraction of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival always included a one-liner in their show that runs through my head over and over again in life.

I feel like I'm riding through the sewer in a glass-bottomed boat. I'm in this shit, but I'm clearly above it.

If you've read my earlier posts, you already have the impression that the Swedish health care system doesn't earn a great deal of respect from me or strike me as full of competent people (and that's quite an understatement). This week I'm having a new experience with bloated and dysfunctional bureaucracy, and it's a two-fer involving both Försäkringskassan and the post office!

I've been on 50% sick leave since the beginning of June. This means that a doctor has declared that there is a good reason for me to work only 4 hours a day, has signed an official form stating such, and that both my employer and Försäkringskassan have received a copy of this form. Försäkringskassan are the people who are to pay me for the hours of missed work. Essentially, if you live and work in Sweden and cannot work for a medical reason, you get 80% of your normal pay for the time you've missed. Försäkringskassan, FK, are the people who pay you this money. They also pay lots of other things, like pension, maternity/paternity leave money, a monthly payment to anyone who has a kid under 16, subsidies to people who can't afford their rent, etc.

I've never received money from FK before, but I was aware that it would likely be an uphill battle -- if for no other reason than it's just typical that you'll have to end up fighting with a disorganized fiasco of an organization when you are sick and don't have the energy for it.

I have lived in Sweden for 6 years, and have been an official resident (folkbokförd) during that entire time. (I don't even get how you can live here without being folkbokförd, unless you're an illegal immigrant, in which case I would presume you don't have the right to money from FK, which makes the point moot.) I'm also a Swedish citizen, so I figured that I didn't have to do anything special in order to get my sick-leave money. The HR lady at work agreed, saying that it's supposed to work automatically after she sends them my bank account number and the number of hours I've been away from work. She should know -- it's not like I'm the first employee here to be on sick leave.

Still, I wanted to make sure, so I checked at FK's website. According to them, if you are officially a resident of Sweden, you do not have to register with FK. (For the benefit of Swedish readers, it reads thus: Är du folkbokförd i Sverige behöver du inte registrera dig i Försäkringskassan.)

This turns out to be a lie.

As soon as my employer had sent in the papers about my sick-leave, I received a form home in the mail. It was called Information for Registration (Uppgifter för registrering). It came without instructions or explanation, and the questions were very difficult to answer. Why have you come to Sweden? How long do you plan on staying? In what country are you a citizen? Are your spouse and children coming to Sweden with you? When did you start working at your current job? Where did you work in your home country? They even had a section where I was supposed to check off which documents I was attaching, with the note "NOTE! Some attachments are required!" But, of course, it didn't say which attachments were required. The only documents that they seemed definitely to want were a copy of either my residence permit or my work permit -- neither of which I have because I'm a bloody citizen.

I called them and complained of the paradox that they had placed before me. When I explaiend that I've lived here 6 years and have been a citizen for 3, she sheepishly (and stupidly) said, "We're not used to people already being citizens before they get involved with the welfare system." (It sounds better in Swedish: "Vi är inte vana vid att folk hinner bli medborgare innan de blandar sig med välfärdsystemet.") She encouraged me to fill in the form to the best of my abilities and add an extra sheet explaining everything.

She also said I would have to send a copy of my employment contract. Apparently the fact that it's my employer that reports me sick and tells them how much money to pay me isn't good enough; I have to send my own written proof that I work here and have that salary. Friends of mine who have gotten various forms of payments from FK have not had to provide this much proof; and by this point I was really starting to tend towards outraged. The extra burden of proof on me can not be said to be a result of me being a foreigner, because I am not a foreigner -- I was a foreigner, and quite some time ago.

Anyway. I sent off the form, the explanatory letter, and the copy of my employment contract to the address that was written on the form. It said, very clearly at the top of the form, "Send this form back to the following address." I had also asked the lady on the phone, "Is it this address in Malmö that I send it to?" She confirmed. Alright then.

The letter was sent on June 30, and seriously, ought to have been delivered July 1. But just yesterday when I came to work I got an e-mail from our HR lady saying that just last week she'd called FK and been told that my sick-leave had been denied because I wasn't registered with FK. So I got on the phone to them and started asking what the hell was going on, and was told that "one month isn't enough time for your registration to go through." What?! It takes more than a month to type in my name, address, and how much money I make? Seriously? They said they would contact the person in charge of my case and have them call me.

This is where it gets fun, and where the post office gets involved.

I went home from work -- without having received the promised phone call from FK of course -- and found that the registration form had been delivered back to me, three weeks after I had sent it, and with a note from the post office saying "Address does not exist."

Upon contacting FK again today, I was told, "So sorry, here's the address you want. It's in Visby." But... what? I can understand if some schmuck had wrongly written an address to some FK office in Malmö on my form when it was really an FK office a thousand kilometers away that was supposed to be handling it, but the part that gets me is that they would have written an address that doesn't exist.

So I do a little investigation of the envelope and at the post office's website. The address was P.O. Box 4080, 302 11 Malmö. My envelope clearly did make it to Malmö, as it was stamped as coming from Malmö on its return to me. At the post office's website, I see that P.O. Box 4080 is very much in existence in Malmö -- but the post code is not 302 11, but rather, 203 11. The fact that the post office apparently wracked their brains over this for 3 weeks and apparently couldn't figure it out anyway blows my mind. I can just see them, standing with my envelope in hand, 3 feet away from P.O. Box 4080, going "Gosh, it SAYS Malmö, but the post code is so totally all wrong! Dunno what to do!"

I called again today to complain that my contact person never returned my phone call as promised, and was given yet another address -- not an address in Malmö, not an address in Visby as I was given by e-mail, an address in Östersund.

So somehow a person at FK managed to write the wrong destination, complete with the wrong post code for that destination; they can't seem to decide what the right destination is; the post office manages to get a letter to the right location without having the right post code but then is unable to put a piece of paper in a box; and all this for a form that I really shouldn't have to fill out anyway, but will now have to send again and apparently wait more than a month to get a response.

That response will probably be something about how sick pay has to be claimed within 45 days of missing work or something.