Swedish trade body BOS urges gambling regulator to adopt supervision methods used by other agencies

The Swedish Trade Association for Online Gambling (BOS) has called on Sweden's gambling regulator, Spelinspektionen, to model its supervision on the way other Swedish public bodies work. The report compares the Inspectorate with the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (FI), the Schools Inspectorate (SSI) and the Stockholm County Administrative Board.

BOS Secretary General Gustaf Hoffstedt said the licensed market would benefit if the authority adopted working methods more closely aligned with those of other government agencies. The trade body focuses in particular on the Inspectorate's sanctions policy. It argues that sanction scaling could be more proportional, pointing to the FI and the County Board, which set fees at lower points of their available ranges: below 20-27% for the FI and under 5% for the County. According to BOS, this ties penalties more closely to turnover and the severity of the offence.

The association also wants a more system-oriented approach to anti-money laundering supervision. Under this model, regulators would concentrate on overarching risk assessments, governance and procedures, and assess an operator's complete compliance framework rather than individual errors. BOS says the Inspectorate's current approach overlooks operator risk models and gives an incomplete picture of risk management. It noted that 11 of 12 Inspectorate decisions under Sweden's 2021 AML Act rested on small samples of five to 15 customer files, without considering business-wide risk assessments. Hoffstedt said the changes would lead to a more risk-based approach, strengthening anti-money laundering work and other areas of supervision.

The source notes the Inspectorate could counter that file-level errors should not occur in the first place. Like regulators in Britain and the Netherlands, it is active in enforcement.

Disagreements between BOS and the regulator are not new. The trade body has repeatedly raised concerns about channelisation since Sweden ended its state gambling monopoly in 2019. The overall channelisation rate is 84%, with sports betting at 95% and online casino at 68%, according to the latest figures. Last year's BOS study, also carried out by Nordic Legal, cited a narrow definition of permissible games as a factor that puts licensed firms at a disadvantage against offshore and illegal operators.

BOS did not describe the Inspectorate as uniformly problematic, and this year's report praises its nuance on sanction severity in certain cases. Hoffstedt said he hoped the report could serve as a basis for the authority to look to other agencies in its approach to supervision and sanctions.