Sometimes Sweden just seems to drift in an alternative reality.

One major news story right now is about people cheating on child sickness benefits. Sweden has a wonderful welfare benefit that allows the parents of children up to the age of 11 to stay home with the child if he or she is too sick to go to school or daycare. You get 80 percent of your regular pay for the days you are home. This is called the Temporary Parental Benefit.

I think virtually all of us from outside the country assumed that the massive bureacracy that is the Swedish Social Insurance Agency actually checked up to make sure that parents applying for the benefit actually did not go to work that day and that the child in question actually was at home. After all, employers are required to keep track of such things, and schools certainly have to register when children are not present. It’s all in computers.

This week we discovered from Swedish Radio News that far from bothering to compare computer files, all the agency has done are “random checks” apparently calling a handful of schools to see if kids were there or not. It appears that many parents were cheating. So now that the bureaucrats have been caught with their pants down not doing their jobs, what is their solution to the problem?

Well, it has nothing to do with working harder. Now they want to require parents who apply for the benefit to get papers from the daycare centers and schools involved, and to file these. Which means lots more work for already underfunded schools.

According to the report, some 200 million kronor a year, almost 30 million dollars, is going to parents who don’t deserve the benefit. Presumably if they actually bothered to check themselves, this would mean 30 million more dollars a year in the Treasury, which would no doubt pay for the time staff need to do the work most of us thought they were supposed to be doing all along.

Instead, the state seems to want to pocket the money, and wants to force daycare centers and schools to do a bunch of new work, unfunded. The sad thing about the debate here on this issue, is that everyone seems to be OK with this, and no one seems to think that the bureaucrats ought to be doing their jobs.