Swedish audit office calls out Spelinspektionen “inadequate”

A report by Sweden’s National Audit Office (NAO) has condemned the effectiveness of the country’s gambling regulator, the Swedish Gaming Authority or Spelinspektionen, as the watchdog is known by its Swedish acronym.

The report, published on NAO’s website, details what it sees as multiple shortcomings in the way Spelinspektionen has run oversight of the industry, and it assesses the first five years of operation of the regulated gambling market in the country.

Swedish gambling regulator under fire by NAO

The report has also prompted a polemic, with the Swedish Trade Association for Online Gambling and the regulator itself, expressing strong opinions in the wake of the publication. According to NAO, however, the report is justified.

Riksrevisionen, as NAO is known in Swedish, has insisted that the gambling regulator is "less efficient" than expected. According to NAO, there have been several persistent issues that the regulator has still not addressed.

One of them was the poor management of the regulator’s available resources, including inefficient time management. NAO claimed that Spelinspektionen was habitually prioritizing license application processes over what it saw as more important supervisory duties.

One of those is better planning on systematic risk analysis, which it is lacking. Another matter that NAO criticized Spelinspektionen heavily on was its track record of following up in cases involving operators or entities that have been targeted in previous enforcement actions.

Following decisions, Spelinspektionen would not follow up to check whether an entity has complied fully, NAO’s report said. The report, though, is not meant to just criticize.

It also lays the groundwork for improvement, with Riksrevisionen pointing out several improvements that can be made, including a better risk management-based approach when it comes to resource allocation, frequent reports to the government, and improving its supervisory capabilities.

In a press statement published on its website, Spelinspektionen responded to the report and its stipulations with the regulator welcoming NAO’s findings and acknowledging that there is still more work to do to strengthen its regulatory oversight of the industry.

"We can look back on six very intense years with a new framework legislation, new actors and new tasks in a completely new regulation," Spelinspektionen Director-General Camilla Rosenberg has said. Rosenberg assured that the regulator is working "continuously" to develop and streamline its processes and routines.

Identifying who the real culprits are and how to make things better

In the meantime, the Swedish Trade Association for Online Gambling (BOS), has similarly welcomed the findings of the report, and paid particular attention to one of the report’s stipulations – that a recommendation of the Gambling Act’s scope of application should most likely be undertaken. BOS Secretary-General Gustaf Hoffstedt released a statement:

"That today’s gambling legislation allows such extensive parts of the gambling market to operate without a license is unsustainable. In front of both the current and previous governments, we have advocated an expansion of the Gambling Act’s scope of application. In this way, it would become generally illegal for gambling companies that lack a Swedish gambling license to accept Swedish gambling consumers, and as a consequence, these companies must geoblock Sweden. It is very welcome that the National Audit Office reasons in a similar way in the report published today."

BOS took issue with the fact that under current laws, only websites that localize their content and use Swedish as a native language along with the Swedish krona are deemed illegal. In contrast, those that are run in English and use the euro currency, but are still available to Swedish players are not.

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