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Comment by hpkuarg | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how Swedes maintain their reputation of having a well-run, corruption-free public sector?

Corruption and inefficiency of this kind is a relatively new phenomenon, stemming from a regime of letting private contractors run the whole show. A fun fact is that Stockholm has one of the most expensive buildings in the world: Nya Karolinska, which has cost (converted from Swedish currency) around 2 billion dollars. The reason behind this is that construction was run as a public-private partnership. Meaning you shove loads of cash into private hands while you get none of the benefit.

All money spent by government goes into private hands. There are no "public hands"

The whole thing just reeked. Boston Consulting Group had junior consultants billing 200 hours a month but couldn’t produce documentation of what the actually did

Among other things, that we get angry in public when this happens. Hopefully that someone will see at least some consequence. That we are even surprised and upset about this I think is a good sign. I’m sure there are places where people would shrug even if the brother of the politician in question was running the firm that got the contract. Thankfully we have very little of that.

Do we though? There's a couple of government watchdogs that specifically track waste of taxpayer money, and sometimes underlying corruption. Those names (Slöso) are considered by both politicians and certain political leaning citizens as "right wing capitalist propaganda machines/special interest outlets".

I vividly remember how everyone shrugged of some small, local politician spending 50 Million SEK(5 Mil USD) on some project to "Cheer up the town square" ended up with 5 contractors, all friend of the local politician, that produced one 50 page report on how "dancing and talkin street lamps will cheer up the town square" was the final result. The politician denied to answer further question to reporters, insisting the project gave good insights, and no one gave a single crap

Slöseriombudsmannen is employed by the private lobbyist group Skattebetalarna. The love to rage about stuff like the thing you mentioned but have “a curious disposition” with stuff like Nya Karolinska:

https://www.skattebetalarna.se/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Sk...

And your point is? Never claimed they were perfect and some of their more nitty picky hit pieces have been criticized by their followers too.

My point is rather that the issue of "wasting tax payer money" should in principle not have any political side; its about efficiency and both left and right should engage in the question. If anything the side that is vouching for more government should be the one leading the discussion of the efficiency of tax payer money utilization.

Yet most just jump to simple adhomiem attack on the critisizers. "right wing propaganda"; That was my point. That we pretend to care but we don't, and rather switch the discussion to petty tribalist name-calling.

And I'm well aware the sponsors of the organization and that they probably have some rotten eggs in the basket too.

My point is I don't like them :) Seriously though, I feel they do a lot of astroturfing and smokescreening to make a lot of noise about inconsequential stuff while saying nothing or very tame things about the real leaks in privatized education and healthcare.

If you look at their "Worst of 2020", almost everything is below 10MSek, which is drop in the bucket budgetwise https://skattebetalarna.se/arets-varsta-sloseri-2020/)

Does any country have a corruption-free public sector?

This doesn't sound like corruption to me and does any government have good IT? Maybe Estonia?

Actually Swedish govt has really good IT. I use the actual app a lot with 3 kids in the school system here in Stockholm. It's not that bad, functional UI, but non-IT folks could easily have problems. Some stupid decisions - like a whole new app for reporting absences - where you get redirected there, but with SSO. I suspect the contractors here are the bad boys, but there should be somebody in Stockholmsstad who stops these ridiculous changes. Probably the project mgr in Stockholmsstad is not technically literate enough and is getting hoodwinked about this app being a security threat.

I hope this publicity changes things.

Even if some of the kinks have been worked out this still cost us a billion sek and counting.

It’s like something from the early 2000 and it’s sad to see.

You can “feel the requirements” as you try to navigate pages.

It makes my techie heart ache... :)

This definitely sounds like corruption, and every gov contract globally is handled similarly. The sooner people realize that their gov is not special, the better.

By ignorant media in the US that hand picks what fits the narrative.

Hanlon's razor. The problem with Swedish public financed IT, is a) the requirement by anti corruption legislation to choose the cheapest solution b) the lack of competence by the people in charge of writing public tendors

Who said they do?

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