– I believe that the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority should always report to the police in such cases. The words belong to Labor Minister Marte Mjøs Persen (Ap) and fell in the Storting on 24 November. Then the elected officials debated what the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority should do with serious offences. The minister was clear: Serious offenses must be reported. The Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority typically reports after accidents or gross exploitation of workers. – I expect the police and prosecutors to follow up, said Persen in the Storting. On the same day, the elected representatives made the following decision: “Working life crimes of a serious nature must routinely be reported to the police”. But what has happened to the cases that the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority has already reported? Labor Minister Marte Mjøs Persen (Ap) debates in the Storting how the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority should react to violations of the Working Environment Act on 24 November 2022. Photo: Patrick da Silva Sæther / news Almost no one is convicted The Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority informs news that they have submitted 507 reports to the police since 2016. But the supervisory authority does not have a complete overview of the outcome of the cases. news has therefore requested access to the police registers. We have then linked the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority’s information with that of the police. This is how we have found the outcome in several of the cases. After news made contact, the inspectorate has also gone through cases again. The outcome of the vast majority of reports has now been identified: 6.5 per cent led to a trial and a verdict. 40 percent were dropped by the police. 38 percent led to a referral. 3 per cent led to a failure to prosecute. The rest of the cases are mainly still under investigation. (Read how news has mapped the cases in the fact box at the bottom of the case.) FATAL ACCIDENT: Two died when the metal factory Metallco in Toten exploded in 2017. The Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority reported the case to the police. In the district court, the general manager was sentenced to ten months in prison. The Court of Appeal reduced the penalty to only a fine of NOK 25,000. Photo: Totens Blad Marit Mathisen / NTB scanpix Storting representative Dagfinn Olsen (Frp) reacts to the figures. Storting representative Dagfinn Olsen (Frp) thinks all too often that reports lead to judgment. Photo: Mathias Mikalsen / news – It must be possible to get more convictions. And the fact that 40 percent of the cases are dropped is bad. It was Olsen who advocated in the autumn for ordering the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority to report more often. He believes the government must find out how the inspectorate and the police can work together better. Employment law lawyer Mari Verling is surprised by the figures presented by news: – Since the case has been reported by the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority, which is a professional body, one would think that the proportion of fines and sentences would be higher, she says. The Norwegian Labor Inspectorate itself would like to see more convictions. – We could imagine that several cases ended up with a verdict. Because a judgment sets a precedent for how the regulations are to be interpreted, says Stig Magnar Løvås, director of the department for supervision. – What do you think about the fact that 40 percent of the cases are dropped? – We complain about a good number of layoffs. This applies in particular to cases which are based on the position of the evidence. We don’t always agree with the police there. The police can question people, which we cannot. It can reveal new relationships. So we almost have to take the number into account. Gives a fee instead of reporting The Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority has almost stopped reporting to the police, as Aftenposten has mentioned. In the peak year of 2017, the inspectorate submitted a total of 134 reports to the police. This year: Eleven. – It is strange that the number has dropped so sharply. There is no reason to believe that there is less serious crime in working life now, says lawyer Verling to news. Inspectorate director Løvås, of the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority, explains the decrease by the fact that the inspectorate reports fewer accidents, because the police themselves open a case. The same applies to the work at A-crime centres, confirms Torgeir Moholt, director of the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority’s department for workplace crime. news has collected figures from the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority on fines, which are also called infringement fees, in the same period. Here the graph goes a different way. So why has the number of reviews dropped sharply, while the number of fines has increased? The inspectorate comments on this in its latest annual report: “The Norwegian Labor Inspectorate is now issuing infringement fines for several matters that we previously considered reporting. This change is reflected in fewer reports, and an increase in the use of infringement fees (…)” news has compared the explanation with the draft of the Working Environment Act from 2013. There it is emphasized that even if the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority were to be allowed to issue a fee, it should not replace police reports: ” At the same time, an infringement fee shall not be a substitute for a report.” So why then does the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority write in the annual report that they now give a fee instead of reporting? – To some extent, this is due to new authorizations to use fees. For example, in 2020 we were allowed to give a fee to those who break the decision to stop. We had to review this previously. What’s more, a fee provides a preventive effect significantly faster than the outcome of a police investigation, which often takes two or three years, says Løvås. Stig Magnar Løvås is director of supervision at the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority. Photo: THOR NIELSEN / THOR NIELSEN – Don’t you confuse the severity of a report with a fee? – We still report the most serious cases. But we have probably raised the threshold for what we review. Løvås points out that the preparatory work refers to fees as a means of “relieving the burden on the police and the prosecution.” Wants an investigation by the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority Advokat Verling is, however, critical of the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority’s practice. Lawyer Mari Verling, at the law firm Kvale, is an expert in employment law. Photo: Espen Sturlason / Sturlason AS Polyfoto – The Storting has been clear that reviews should not be replaced with a fee. In the annual report, the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority writes that they are doing just this. It sends an unfortunate signal of seriousness, she says. Lawyer Thorkil H. Aschehoug is also critical. – I think that over time a dissatisfaction has crept in with the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority about how the police follow up on reports. Instead of making a report, the supervisory authority seems to choose an infringement fee. From a legal point of view, this is not unproblematic, he says. Aschehoug heads the employment department at the law firm Grette. He himself has won several complaints against the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority on behalf of companies. CRITICAL: Thorkild H. Aschehoug heads the employment department at the law firm Grette. He is critical of how the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority’s fee practice has developed. Photo: Grette In the autumn, he got the authority to delete the record fee of one and a half million kroner. – I see tendencies for the inspectorate to use fees beyond the mandate they received from the Storting, he says. The lawyer believes that the inspectorate issues fees too often, without sufficient evidence and with too high amounts. – These conditions worry me, he says. Now Aschehoug is advocating for an investigation of the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority’s fee practices. – It is high time to take a closer look at whether they are sticking to guidelines from the Storting, or have distanced themselves from them. This is important to clarify before the amount ceiling is raised, he says. – Who should investigate the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority? – It can be done by the National Audit Office. One can also outsource such a mission to private investigators. The Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority rejects the criticism from the lawyers: – Our practice is in line with the intention of the law. For many years, we have issued orders for a number of rule breaches without this having had sufficient effect. After we introduced fees on a larger scale, more people follow the regulations. We believe this has also prevented accidents. – Are you dissatisfied with the police’s efforts? – We are complaining about a number of layoffs. And experience that some police districts give higher priority to matters of the working environment. But we have no general impression that the police do not follow up on our reports. This is how news has worked to find the outcome of the reports. The Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority has informed news that they have submitted 507 reports to the police since 2016. The Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority’s own statistics originally lacked the outcome in 139 cases. In order to find the outcome in these cases, news asked the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority for key information. We learned the date of the report, the police district that received the report and whether or not it was related to an occupational accident. At the same time, news asked for and received access to key information from the police’s registers on all cases within the “working environment” type of crime in the period 1 January 2016–30. June 2022. A total of 5,295 such police cases have been registered in the period. We then washed the information from the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority against the information from the police. We then found several cases where the date and police district matched. We then examined the Norwegian Labor Inspectorate’s information on accident/non-accident matched the police’s coding of the case. If this was also true, we retrieved the outcome of the case. This is how news gained clarity in cases that the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority did not know the status of. At the same time, the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority went through its own cases again and found results in a few more cases. Along the way, news has also contacted police districts to get details about the cases. One police case was closed after initial investigations, but without an investigation being established. news has chosen to count this as abandoned. Many of the cases that still have an unknown outcome are still under investigation. In some cases, the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority and the police may have registered the report on different dates. Thus, the case has not been identified in news’s matching, which assumes a coincidence in date.
ttn-69
Only 6.5 percent of the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority’s reports to the police have led to a verdict – news Dokumentar
