42 annual report 2011 In addition, the authority must –– confirm that the postal service has not returned the letter to the authority and/or –– check whether there were irregularities in postal deliveries in the relevant area at the time of the dispatch. Finally, the authority must –– investigate when any other parties or authorities received their copies of the letter. In this way, it is possible to establish an assumption that the letter to the citizen has also been handled correctly by both the authority and the postal service. In the case concerning the senior citizen (Annual Report of the Parliamentary Ombudsman, 2010, Case No. 2010 14-2), the Ombudsman found no grounds for criticising that the Social Tribunal assumed that the letter had arrived the day after it was dated, even though the senior citizen was able to produce several letters sent to him by authorities which had not been mailed the day they were dated. The fact that he could refer to 15 newspaper articles and letters to the editor concerning postal service errors did not help him either, as the local authority had met the requirements for an authority’s production of evidence in order for a letter to be regarded as having arrived on time. Dispute ending up in court The case of the sickness benefit recipient who failed to attend an information meeting at the job centre because according to her own information she had not received the letter summoning her to the meeting illustrates how difficult the assessment of evidence can be in a specific case. The Ombudsman criticised (Annual Report of the Parliamentary Ombudsman, 2011, Case No. 2011 1-4) that the Employment Appeals Board had not requested further information about the local authority’s mail dispatch before assessing whether the summons to the information meeting had arrived. However, this information was procured while the Ombudsman was processing the case. In addition, the Ombudsman questioned whether the local authority’s internal mailing routines were as secure as they should be. His doubt arose for several reasons: