Nav asks people who may have been affected by erroneous decisions and have been denied family benefits to get in touch. The organization Nav-Opryddingen and one of Norway’s leading EEA experts react strongly, saying that Nav must clean up itself.
In a new message on Thursday, Nav acknowledged that they had misinterpreted the EEA rules in the processing of family benefits abroad:
“Nav has changed the practice for all benefits that are considered family benefits according to the EEA regulations. Those who believe they have or have had a case that may be affected by the change in practice can contact Nav”, writes the agency in a press release.
Strange
– Many people may wrongly be denied benefits such as child benefit, transitional allowance and cash support. I think it is strange that Nav is setting up a system where those who have been affected have to contact Nav themselves, says Christoffer Conrad Eriksen, law professor at the University of Oslo.
He receives full support from the organization Nav-Optryddingen. Later this year, they will face the state in the Oslo district court with demands for compensation and restitution for those who were wrongfully convicted in the previous Nav scandal.
– Nav cannot expect people to figure this out themselves. Nav-Optryddingen is experiencing having to sort out mistakes that the state has inflicted on people and families, and as Nav claims today it will be too time-consuming for them to clean up. But it is Nav that has the registers and systems, and has to clean up itself, says Rune Halseth, head of Nav-Optryddingen to VG.
Overrun by the court
The EFTA Court stated last summer that transitional allowance for a single mother or father is a family benefit. Thus, since 1994, Nav has not had the correct interpretation of the EEA rules for family benefits.
Christoffer Conrad Eriksen says that the government and the civil service may have known that they were taking a big risk in these cases:
– There are many indications that this is a risk that has been known for a number of years. And how this risk has been assessed seems to be a theme in the 2014 report. But so much of this report is still slanderous, so that it is impossible to know for sure how this risk was assessed, says Eriksen.
Neither the plaintiffs in the Nav lawsuit nor the Storting’s control committee have been given full access to the report from 2014 on social security exports.
– When the social security scandal broke in 2019, the internal audit in Nav claimed that this was a lone black swan. What it looks like now, with what we know from the 2014 report and this case, indicates a conscious attitude from the authorities to stretch the room for action, and let those who go on social security pay the price for wrong assessments, says Eriksen.
He also has a kick about the Storting’s unwillingness to get to the bottom of the issues:
– The Nav scandal and this new admission may have affected far more than 10,000 and people have been sentenced to prison. So the bottom line is that the Storting still does not see the benefit of investigating the matter thoroughly. Neither Solberg nor Støre’s government has wanted to give the public the transparency necessary to understand what has happened.
Was against
In the legal case that was supposed to clean up the social security scandal, the government argued against the fact that transitional allowance for single parents was covered by the social security regulation.
When the Storting dealt with the change in the law in the autumn of 2022, Speaker Per Olaf Lundteigen acknowledged that he had not received support to adapt this benefit to the EEA.
– There the government will bring a new matter to the Storting – even if it was something that we could have advantageously cleared up in this round, Lundteigen told VG on 25 October.
