When SVT News last year asked the Swedish Companies Registration Office why they approve unlikely growth figures without questioning, the answer was that it was not included in the authority's tasks.

"We have not received any such assignment from the government and we have requested clarification of what we should do with the collection of the annual reports and how they should be reviewed," said department head Helene Thorgren.

So the minister replied

The then Minister for Business and Industry, Mikael Damberg (S), said he was prepared to review the Swedish Companies Administration's directive, but at the same time felt that the authority should be able to check the figures even without an explicit assignment.

- Already, you can find ways to get around a regulatory framework that is quite square. In a close dialogue with the police, the Swedish Tax Agency and the Swedish Crime Agency, it should be possible to get around this, Damberg told SVT News.

"Hard to know"

The Swedish Companies Agency has tightened its controls on several points, among other things, to discover if anyone is trying to place a so-called goalkeeper on a company's board of directors. But one does not systematically look for inflated figures.

“It is true that we have tightened the control of ID documents but that we have not developed any system for detecting inflated figures in annual reports. The reason for this is that it is very difficult for the Swedish Companies Registration Office to know whether the figures are inflated or not, ”the authority's general counsel Elisabeth Lagerqvist writes to SVT.

“I do not know that the matter has been considered by the agency. We have a hard time knowing that it can really be the number that is stated or not. "

SVT's review shows that several new cases of dramatic growth increases have been registered by the Swedish Companies Registration Office in the past year - in companies that have no employees.