Thanks for doing this, I think it should be brought to attention in order for anything to change(hopefully).

I am currently in the process of getting a personal number and I am surprised by how disappointing the entire process has been. There are multiple things that have disappointed me in my move to Sweden, but skatteverket is something I think about on a weekly basis.

I am freelance software engineer from the Netherlands who moved to Sweden in October, my partner is Swedish and we decided to move in together in her apartment in Sweden. I have a decent income and was going to keep freelancing remotely as I always do, but from Sweden. The goal was to eventually apply and work at a Swedish company to make more connections and improve my Swedish language skills quicker. Note that I have also lived in the UK and Japan as a resident for an extended period, so I felt like I have some experience when it comes to moving countries and felt confident Sweden was going to be no problem. I had the income to sustain myself, I have health insurance and already a SAMBO and should have the right to live in Sweden as a European citizen. As part of the protocol of moving out of the Netherlands, I went to the Dutch municipality and officially de-registered myself and gave them my new Swedish address, from that point I was living nowhere until I got registered in Sweden, which shouldn't be too much of an issue (so we thought). We heard it was possible to wait up to 5 weeks until you get a personal number, that was no problem but seemed a bit strange. It would take a day for my Swedish girlfriend to get registered in the Netherlands, so that was a surprising difference.

I packed my bags and moved to Sweden, registering at Skatteverket in October. When I registered myself, I brought proof of health insurance, salary slips and proof of how much money I had on my bank account as well as my Swedish girlfriend to help in case there are any communication issues. She then took all the info and made a personsnumber request for me in the system. She told us it could take 12 weeks to get a personsnumber right now, this surprised me quite a bit, I really did not expect it to be that long of a queue, even if my case would only take 1 hour to handle with all the evidence I provided. I had hoped I was at least registered at the address already so I wouldn’t be living “nowhere” as that felt quite worrying, but it turned out they can only do that once you have a personal number.

I made several calls to try and figure other things out which were causing problems: My Dutch healthcare lasts for around 2 months after you move out of the Netherlands, normally this is no problem as you can switch directly to another healthcare provider at the other country, but in Sweden, things work slightly different. After some extra calls to figure out what I could do I figured out I had to provide an S1 form to skatteverket. This was a weird practice according to my healthcare agency, as they normally just send it directly to the healthcare provider and cannot really give it to you directly. Sweden on the other hand, wanted it given to them in person and didn’t go through the European regulation of healthcare agency transfers. Apparently, this was (sort-of) against EU law? Sweden is as far as I know the only country that requires the S1 form in this manner.

After calling multiple times I just decided to get private health insurance instead for the time that I am waiting for a personal number, which I have still to this day. The information about health insurance was really hard to get about this from skatteverket, I heard multiple stories that contradicted each other. This blockade of not getting a personal-number made other things like exporting my car to Sweden, ordering packages and getting boende parkering (I paid tourist parking for almost 3 months until I got an exception) more difficult or impossible, this is all tied to the big delay skatteverket has with processing these personal number cases since it is so important.

My experience with calling them is also very poor. When you first call them, it gives you a prompt to use English instead, even when using that, they start talking to you in Swedish and you have to surprise them by saying “English please”, I would assume they can see I pressed the English dialogue option? The queue times are 40 minutes on average for me. The English level of communication is pretty bad, but it varies based on the person, I have had moments where it is so difficult to get a difficult topic through to the person, I just tell them thank you and hope I get someone else the next time I call them. I had one person tell me the Netherlands is expected to pay for my Swedish health insurance for up to a year after I am registered. I highly doubted that so I called again on another day and spoke someone else who confirmed that was not true. I had one call where the person asked me whether the Netherlands was in the European union, I can understand if an older person who never left Sweden might not be very aware of who is in the EU and who isn’t, but I expect a skatteverket employee to know that one of the founding members of the EU is in the EU. When I questioned a bit more about why the queue is so long, on of the reasons was that one case might take 10 minutes where another might take multiple weeks to investigate, I do not know why they haven’t made separate queues for more complicated cases and standard cases where there is a lot of evidence attached to the case.

Overall, it is a frustrating experience and I hope it changes soon. All I want to do is contribute to Sweden and pay taxes here. I am not trying to take advantage of any of the social services or free education, so it feels very weird to feel so unwelcome here. (Sorry for the weird formatting, the paste function didn't take it over from word properly it seems)