64 CASE NO. 15/03328 CASE NO. 15/03581 A municipally owned vehicle had twice been seen outside a municipal employee’s home. The council informed the employee of this and gave ham a warning for his personal use of municipality vehicles. When in 2011 the owners of a holiday home became suspicious that the adjoining lot was being used for depositing construction waste, they complained to the municipality. At first, the municipality did not find that anything could be done about it. The employee – who had been off work on the days of his alleged misuse of the municipality vehicles – protested and said that it would have been impossible for him to borrow a vehicle because his colleagues would then have missed it in their daily work. He asked for evidence and wrote that it had to be an act of magic if the municipality’s allegation were true. But the municipality maintained its decision on ‘the present basis’. The Ombudsman asked the municipality to clarify for the employee what the municipality had done to check the employee’s information that he had not used the vehicle. The Ombudsman also asked if the municipality had made a note of who had seen the municipally owned vehicle outside the employee’s home. The municipality then withdrew the warning, as the evidence was insufficient. When the Ombudsman sends on a complaint to an authority, he can sometimes help the citizen to pinpoint key complaint matters or arguments or to get a detailed explanation for a decision. CASE NO. 15/03543 ‘Hereby I kindly remind you of the attached letter’, a lawyer wrote to the Ombudsman. The attached letter was a complaint from one of the lawyer’s clients, dated three months earlier and addressed to the Ombudsman. But the Ombudsman had never received the complaint. Therefore, a staff member at the Ombudsman institution made a phone call to the lawyer and left a message on the answering machine asking the lawyer to return the call. However, the lawyer never did. Subsequently, the Ombudsman wrote to the lawyer that since he had not received the original enquiry and since the complaint was now time-barred according to the twelve-month time limit in the Ombudsman Act, the Ombudsman did not intend to take further steps in the matter. In 2015, the Ombudsman opened approx. 4,800 cases based on the complaints he received. More and more construction waste was added at the adjoining lot, and in 2014, the municipality inspected the lot once again after repeated complaints from the holiday home owners. Now the municipality took the matter in hand. The holiday home owners were most dissatisfied with the municipality’s case processing, and they complained to the Ombudsman in 2015. However, since the municipality had taken action in the matter and, in addition to that, apologised for the course of events, the Ombudsman found no grounds for investigating the complaint further. ‘The municipality’ is the authority that Danes are most often in contact with. Sometimes this leads to disagreements. In 2015, the Ombudsman concluded 1,252 cases with a municipality as the primarily responsible authority. CASE NO. 15/04149 A letter in Russian had to be sent to an external translator before the Ombudsman could reply. The letter was from a Russian woman who complained about the Refugee Board’s rejection of her application for asylum. According to the Aliens Act, the Ombudsman cannot investigate complaints about the Refugee Board. In quite exceptional cases, however, he can choose to investigate a decision by the Refugee Board, but he found no grounds for doing so in this case. Hence, the Ombudsman wrote to the woman that he would not take any further action in the matter. The letter was translated into Russian before it was sent to the woman. The Ombudsman often receives complaints in other languages than Danish. Please see the Ombudsman’s website, www.ombudsmanden.dk, for information in a number of foreign languages about the institution’s work.