Mina sidor - how to handle mandates

Do you have a customer in the form of a government agency or municipality that handles mandates? If so, this might be of interest!

What is it about? Bolagsverket (a Swedish authority) offers a new service called "Mina ombud" (https://minaombud.se/). In short, the service allows business owners to appoint representatives (agents) for the company in its dealings with government agencies/municipalities.

What are the benefits?

The government agency/municipality no longer has to handle mandates manually and instead transfers the responsibility to the company and Bolagsverket. This includes everything from verifying that the "mandate giver" has the right to grant mandates, to revoking and specifying how long a particular mandate should be valid.

The company, on the other hand, gets ONE place to administer its agents instead of having to log in to various government agencies/municipalities websites to do this.

How does it work?

Prerequisites

The government agency creates a mandate containing one, or more, permissions. For example, if the agency has five different e-services, these can be added as five permissions to the mandate.

Assigning a mandate to an agent

1. A company signatory defines who the intended agent is and for how long the mandate permission should last.

2. The company signatory then checks one or more of the permissions in the mandate.

3. Finally, the company signatory sign the mandate. Depending on the company structure, more than one person from the company might have to sign before the mandate is valid. This is because something called “teckningsrätt” has to be achieved. 

Using the mandate

When a person logs in to the government agency (for example "Mina sidor"), the agency asks the "Mina ombud"-service to verify whether the person has been assigned any permissions. If so, it’s then up to “Mina sidor” to decide what this means for the person in question when using “Mina sidor”.

More information
To date, there is only one municipality running this in production. In March, one of our customers will likely start to use the service in production. That being said, there are a lot of government agencys and municipalities experimenting with this so I expect its customer base to broaden in the near future.

The people from Bolagsverket who are working with Mina ombud have been swift to respond to any questions and they are still developing the platform.

You can have a look at the example code that Bolagsverket has published on Github!

https://github.com/bolagsverket