BOS urges Spelinspektionen to rethink enforcement methods
Sweden's online gambling trade body wants the gambling regulator to borrow supervisory practices from the financial, education and local government sectors.
The Swedish Trade Association for Online Gambling (BOS) has called on Spelinspektionen, the country's gambling regulator, to rework its approach to enforcement by looking at how other Swedish authorities operate.
BOS wants the Inspectorate to study the working methods of the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (FI), the Schools Inspectorate (SSI) and the Stockholm County Administrative Board, arguing that closer alignment with these bodies would support better long-term compliance in the licensed gambling market.
"We believe that the licensed gambling market in Sweden would benefit if the Swedish Gambling Authority were to adopt working methods more closely aligned with those of other Swedish government agencies," said Gustaf Hoffstedt, Secretary General of BOS.
The call forms part of a report, produced for BOS by Nordic Legal, that compares Spelinspektionen's sanctions policy with those of the three other regulators. BOS singles out the Inspectorate's enforcement activity, which SBC News notes sits alongside comparably active regulators such as the British Gambling Commission and the Dutch Kansspelautoriteit, as an area where sanction scaling could be made more proportional.
BOS points out that the FI sets sanction fees below 20 to 27% of its available range, while Stockholm County's figure sits under 5%, which the trade body says ties penalties more closely to turnover and the severity of an offence.
The report also argues for a more "system oriented" approach to anti-money laundering supervision, again citing the FI and Stockholm County as examples. Under this model, regulators would weigh a firm's overarching risk assessments, governance and procedures rather than isolated file-level errors, assessing what BOS calls a company's "complete compliance framework".
The Inspectorate could counter that evaluating a company's full compliance record misses the point, since the underlying file errors should not occur in the first place. BOS maintains, however, that the current approach overlooks operator risk models and leaves regulators with an incomplete view of overall risk management.
According to the trade body, 11 of 12 Inspectorate decisions issued under Sweden's 2021 AML Act were based on samples of just five to 15 customer files, without reference to business-wide risk assessments. Hoffstedt said the proposed changes would "lead to a more risk-based approach, which would strengthen efforts against money laundering and enhance other areas of supervision".
Friction between BOS and the Inspectorate is not new. The trade body has repeatedly raised concerns about channelisation under Sweden's licensing system, introduced in 2019 after the end of the state gambling monopoly that still exists in Denmark and, until next year, Finland.
Sweden's overall channelisation rate stands at 84%, according to the latest figures cited in the report, with sports betting at 95% but online casino lagging at 68%. A BOS study last year, also carried out by Nordic Legal, blamed a narrow definition of permissible casino games for putting licensed Swedish operators at a disadvantage against offshore and unlicensed sites.
BOS was not entirely critical of the regulator's record, praising what it called the Inspectorate's nuance in applying sanctions severity in certain cases. Hoffstedt said BOS hoped the report would give the Swedish Gambling Authority "a basis and an inspiration" to look at how other domestic agencies approach supervision and sanctions.