"A stealth plane shooting on doves" - that's how the most expensive Swedish effort to fight financial crime in years turned out to be. Instead of conducting their own investigations to track down the organized criminals, they sat back and dedicated their time to prosecuting small business owners with bookkeeping trouble.
For decades, the Swedish justice system has been struggling to come to terms with organized financial crime: tax fraud, inside information crime, offshore decoy companies etc. Through several police and attorney office reorganizations, the white-collar criminals have been operating without much interference. With an estimated cost to society of more than 100-150 billion Swedish Kronor ($120 million) a year, the minister of justice decided to create an all new agency: "Ekobrottsmyndigheten."
When the reporter interviewed the responsible officials, they were stunned by our conclusions, and appropriately embarrassed.
Four hundred policemen, 90 specially-trained prosecutors, and a number of tax specialists were installed in new offices in Sweden's three largest cities. With higher salaries than the average police officer and attorney, the most competent staff were recruited to the new "super-department," which got an extensive government budget. After operating for a year and a half, our station's current affairs program "Striptease," decided to examine the results of the costly initiative.
Getting started
The investigative team got copies of all the complaints from the three agencies throughout Sweden. Only available as paper copies, they created large piles at the researcher's desk. An Access database was created in order to get a picture of the most widely prosecuted crimes and individuals. We wanted to know who they were, and if the Swedish authorities finally had managed to track down the most advanced financial criminals.
The essential facts of each defendant was typed into the database, including the name, age, occupation and personal id number. When several suspects were to be tried in the same case, they each got a record in the database. Also, the classification of the crime and a short description of events leading up to the prosecution. We made a note of whether the suspect had been arrested or not, which is a determinant on how severe the crime had been considered by the prosecutor.
Finally, we entered the estimated amount of money withheld and how the crime had come to the police's knowledge - by a bankruptcy report or the tax authorities revisions. In a few cases, it was an independent investigation leading up to the complaint. Some also contained a number (1-3), grading the complexity of the crime by the agency themselves. We adapted their system, grading all the cases accordingly.
The results
Eight-hundred-four suspect profiles and 625 complaints later, we started to analyze the results. By asking questions to the database, we summoned up 18 months' work by the most advanced financial crime unit in Sweden.
First, we got the average criminal; we were able to see that he (very soon, it was clear that he was a man) was a middle-aged Swedish citizen with a small business, having some trouble keeping his books in order. Moreover, he had managed his business badly and gone bankrupt.
Tax authorities discovered some forgotten receipts in a shoebox, and he was taken before the court and accused of tax fraud. Hardly the polished, pinstriped criminal in dark shades taking weekend trips to a tax paradise island to place money in secret bank accounts. Still a definite crime, these were cases that the newly examined attorney at any court could have managed to prosecute.
As it turned out, only six percent of the cases were the top-notch crimes, the bigger part of the administration were simple bookkeeping incidents. Taxi drivers and cleaning companies trying to escape some of the value tax were dominating our database. When the reporter interviewed the responsible officials, they were stunned by our conclusions, and appropriately embarrassed. The minister of justice, however, would not grant us an interview, hoping that the storm would blow over soon.
"Striptease" is Sweden's most influential investigative television program. The title aspires on the fact that power and corruption should be stripped down to the bare truth.
The program has used CAR for a number of stories recently. One investigated the surprisingly large number of Swedes possessing weapon licenses, who are ex-convicts or suffer from severe mental illnesses. In that case, the weapons register was joined with court statistics and hospital records of people receiving treatment fo
Helena Bengstsson can be reached by e-mail at helena.bengstsson@svt.se