Today is the day personal income tax returns are due in Sweden. But most Swedes expecting refunds won’t see their money before mid-August, some 8 to 20 months after the money was withheld from salaries.

This is much better than it used to be. Until a couple of years ago you filed in mid-February and saw your refund no sooner than early December. This was nice to funding Christmas, but otherwise one wondered why the Swedish tax authorities could be so much slower than their American counterparts?

Filling out returms is vastly easier in Sweden now. Because everyone has a national personal number, employers and banks can inform the tax authorities about each individual’s salaries and assets. The tax authorities send each person a return where all this information is already filled in. You can correct possible errors, add missing information, and just sign and return the form.

If everything is correct, you can even approve the return online or by sending an SMS. In these cases refunds are sent out before Midsummer, at the end of June.

There’s just a couple of problems there. Critics have pointed out that young people who have had no experience of filing in any other way, are more likely to just accept the information as given and send the SMS. If there are any errors they miss them.

It’s also been pointed out that the number to send the SMS differs from the number of the television station TV4 by just one digit. Many tax SMS messages have been going to TV4. When you send your return to the tax authorities they reply with confirmatory SMS. But if the sender doesn’t really look for this, they could send their SMS to the wrong number and never know.

In which case, because they would not have filed by May 2, they would be fined.

But the biggest flaw in the system is that all you can do is approve the information on the preprinted return. If you have any extra deductions, you have to write them all up in printed form and mail the return and the attachments with deductions to the tax authorities. They are completely unprepared to accept any other material in digital form.

Actually there seems to be a suspicion about deductions in Sweden. Every now and then the tabloids report on those requested by politicians and rejected by the tax authorities. The implication is that asking for a deduction and not getting it approved means you are guilty of fraud.

Most Americans would probably assume that you apply for what deductions you think you should get, and it is the job of the tax authorities to approve or disapprove of them. Not getting a deduction approved doesn’t mean you were trying to cheat, it means you asked and the tax authority did its job (or not, as the case may be).

It is possible this is because the Swedish tax authorities just don’t employ enough people to monitor to returns, that the whole thing is seen by Swedes as based on some kind of unspoken honors system. But if that is the case, hiring a few more inspectors would probably pay for itself many times over, because they would catch errors and unacceptable deductions far in excess of their salaries.

It is strange how this could be the case in a such a high tax country, a country where the entire system is dependent on high taxes.
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