The quality and supervision of welfare service (GEV) has now completed its crucial audit of the coordinated reception of refugees, which was carried out at the request of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour. The audit, a significant step towards improving the refugee reception system, covers service contracts that were in effect until the end of 2023 and covered nine municipalities of thirteen. The contracts aim to coordinate the reception of refugees so that the state and municipalities ensure continuous and equal service to refugees regardless of where they come from. Municipalities shall, according to the contracts, provide users with individualized services in accordance with the claim description and cost model that is attached to the service contract.

The report has now been published. Staff and managers of the reception municipalities and a sample of service users were interviewed, and various data were examined. Other stakeholders, including the Directorate of Labour, the Icelandic Red Cross, and the Association of Local Authorities, were also interviewed.

The results showed that the users who were interviewed were generally satisfied and grateful for the service they received, a testament to the efforts put in by the municipalities. However, there needed to be a greater implementation of municipalities at the reception. The case managers of smaller municipalities seemed to be able to provide more services than others, the wait there was generally shorter and access to the service was easier. The availability of functional resources was more in the capital area than in the countryside and the waiting for courses was different. It is clear that the opportunities for users to participate actively in society need to be increased, especially in the countryside.

The disparities in the implementation of the service appear to be based largely on two factors, highlighting the need for immediate attention and improvement:

On the one hand, municipalities are independent in their work and set their own rules. This means that users' rights to various grants are different between municipalities.

However, the service agreement and the supporting documents need to be more transparent, and therefore, it was often unclear to the staff what was expected of them. The unclear content and wording of the documents made it difficult for the GEV to take a clear position on whether the services provided by the municipalities were entirely by their provisions.

The presentation of information, or lack thereof, caused municipalities to interpret the requirements for the service in different ways, for example, regarding the provision of housing. Furthermore, the claim description contains almost no mention of assistance for users to deal with trauma, even though it is another main objective of the service. It was the opinion of the GEV that users were not adequately insured for the necessary assistance at the municipalities to deal with trauma.

The vast majority of the municipalities considered it impossible to clearly distinguish between the statutory services and the additional services that the coordinated reception should include when fulfilling the settlement because of the scope and unspecified services that the social services law can cover and because the requirements for the services were not sufficiently defined. As a result, the Ministry’s payments for the project have also covered the costs of the municipalities' statutory services, but this is not the case.

The staff of the municipalities considered that the cost model, which is the basis of payments, needed to reflect the work contribution sufficiently well. Sometimes, the information required to be more detailed and cover issues that the case managers needed to be able to deal with. Several examples of work contributions that are not paid for were also mentioned because they are not taken into account in the cost model. According to the audit, there are various opportunities to use better the work contribution of the case managers and administrators when receiving refugees.

New agreements on the reception of refugees came into force at the beginning of the year; see article on the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour website.