What if OVK is not carried out? Supervision and penalties

If OVK is not carried out on time, nothing happens automatically — there is no charge triggered by a date passing. What happens is supervision: the municipal building committee can order the building's owner to carry out the inspection or to remedy the defects an inspection revealed, and such an order may be coupled with a financial penalty (vite). The basis is in Chapter 11 of the Planning and Building Act.

Who supervises

The building committee in the municipality where the building is located. Not Boverket, which writes the regulations but does not supervise individual buildings, and not the environmental committee — which can, however, act against a poor indoor environment under the Environmental Code. Two authorities can therefore take an interest in the same ventilation system from different directions.

How it works in practice

1. The deficiency is detected. Most commonly: the committee reviews which buildings have no report on file, or a resident reports poor air quality.
2. The committee requests information — report, dates, planned action.
3. An order. If the committee gets no answer, or the answer is that the inspection has not been done, it can order the owner to carry out the inspection or to correct a defect.
4. A penalty. The order may be coupled with a financial penalty, payable if you do not do what you were ordered to within the deadline.

Situation	The committee's tool
The inspection has not been carried out	Order to carry out OVK, may be coupled with a penalty
The inspection shows defects that were not remedied	Order to remedy the defect, may be coupled with a penalty
The owner complies within the deadline	The case is closed; no penalty falls due

Penalty amounts are set in the individual decision and vary. We publish no figures here — anyone stating a general level is guessing.

What actually happens if the OVK is a year overdue?

Probably nothing on the day the delay arises. The risk is that it is discovered at the committee's review or through a report, and that you then receive an order with a deadline. If you comply within the deadline, no penalty falls due. The real problem with a year's delay is therefore rarely the sanction, but that in the meantime you do not know whether the ventilation works in a building where people live — and that a defect, if there is one, has gone unknown for a year.

What actually costs

The sanction is rarely the most expensive consequence of a missed inspection. Three others are more common:

• Emergency work instead of planned work. A defect discovered at inspection must be remedied against a deadline you did not set, often outside the operating budget and outside the framework agreement.
• Indoor environment cases. Complaints about air, damp and smell are handled by the environmental committee in parallel and take more time than the OVK case.
• Credibility in the next procurement and in the boardroom. For a municipal housing company a supervisory remark is a matter that reaches the minutes.

How to avoid the whole thing

There is only one real measure: know the date for every building before it passes. That sounds trivial, and it is for ten buildings. For several hundred it is a document problem — the date is in the previous report, the reports come from different suppliers in different formats, and the list in the spreadsheet is always a little out of date.

Read OVK intervals for how the date is calculated, and OVK in a municipal housing company for how tracking is set up in a large portfolio. What Emphyx does is read the date out of the report and track it per building — see regulatory compliance. If you already hold an order, this is no longer a systems question: then the inspection company is who you call first.

If you have remarks but no order, start here instead: how to remedy an OVK remark.