Trollkarlarna på Servicekontoren : En kvalitativ studie om Skatteverkets beslut att sluta lämna ut personbevis på servicekontoren från och med 15 maj 2017

Sammanfattning: Since the 15th of May 2017 one of Sweden’s biggest authorities ‘’Skatteverket’’ (the Swedish authority of taxes) has decided to stop handing out one specific document on all local service offices around the country. The document, called ‘’personbevis’’, is however a public document that everyone must have access to and that cannot, according to law, be denied a person. Because of this, Skatteverket has internally decided upon a number of exceptions that can be carried out in the local service offices that the local case-officers must comply with. This essay aims to investigate how the local case-officers relate to this rule as street-level bureaucrats using the theory of Roine Johansson from 1992. This has been carried out through a qualitative study that consists out of two types of data; a total number of seven (7) interviews with local case-officers as well as internal material from Skatteverket. The main results are that the local case officer’s freedom of action can categorize them as street level bureaucrats and that they follow the rule from Skatteverket to a very limited extent. The case officers are handing out the document despite the rule because some feel guilt towards the clients when denying them something that is their legal right to pursue. They also identifies issues with the rule in relation to power structures such as client’s ethnicity and educational background and the effect such factors has on the outcome of the negotiations about the public document at issue. The results relate mostly to Johansson’s concept of modern wizards, where it has been put in the hands of the case-officers (the wizards) to transform the behavior of clients in the way Skatteverket wishes. However, they somewhat lose their face when the clients see through the show and organize themselves against the street-level bureaucrats. In that sense, this study also provides new thoughts to complete Johansson theoretical approach further.