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> That's great for transparency, researchers and journalists and makes corruption much harder to get away with. So, I think in this case, "transparency", "rese

> That's great for transparency, researchers and journalists and makes corruption much harder to get away with. So, I think in this case, "transparency", "researchers" and "journalists" are all highly irrelevant. 1. Journalists shouldn't write articles about how person X makes €Xm a year. The friend of my cousins husband was abducted when he was a kid, because the press kept writing articles about how wealthy his family was. Why? Just because they could sell a few newspapers. Despicable. 2. Researchers: the data could easily be anonymized. 3. Transparency. Why? Just because you say everything else is public isn't a valid reason (to me). It's not like you have a choice. Are you OK with a list of all of your assets being public? Every property you own, globally? The exact amount of money on your bank account? How about your medical history, so insurers can easily determine how healthy / sick you are? Or your sexual preference? 4. Corruption: BS. I would seriously doubt people would be stupid enough to receive “dirty" money and then declare it to the tax authority. And if they were, they'd probably route it through a company as consulting fees or something.. Be realistic, please.

bjourne 10y ago
> 1. Journalists shouldn't write articles about how person X makes €Xm a year. I disagree. If some CEO says that workers salaries are too high and he himself increased his salary by 50% the last year, that is important for journalists to write about. > 2. Researchers: the data could easily be anonymized. Researches are interested in seeing how different variables correlate with salary. Like gender, age, education level, parents social status and so on. Those correlations can't be made on anonymized data. > 3. Transparency. Why? Just because you say everything else is public isn't a valid reason (to me). You misunderstand. Transparency is about the government being transparent with it's data, not about ME being transparent. I'm allowed to keep as many secrets as I want -- the government is not. For example if the government had records on my sexual preference or political affiliation, I for sure would prefer if that data was public and not kept secret. > 4. Corruption: BS. I would seriously doubt people would be stupid enough to receive “dirty" money and then declare it to the tax authority. A lot of corruption involves one party "gifting" the other something. That kind of corruption has been caught by the tax authority.
- charlesdm 10y ago
  > A lot of corruption involves one party "gifting" the other something. That kind of corruption has been caught by the tax authority. Like what? A house? You can't really catch cash transactions. I would assume that in developed economies the "easiest" and least transparent way of corruption happening is friends doing each other favours. I.e. person A can influence the granting of permits through his friend, person B. In return for helping person C get a permit, he gets a board seat in the company of person D, via person C.
friendzis 10y ago
1. Should journalists write articles about how company X made €Y in profits last year? What about self-employed/single-person-companies? 2. As it was stated properly anonymized data would only allow faceting by absolute income and researchers are interested in many other facets. 3. I'm not from Norway (know some people there) so might be mistaken, but as far as I understand only 3 things are public: income, asset-value, tax. Income and asset structure (income may be wage or interest, assets might be cash in a sock/bank, shares or a house) are not disclosed. Health insurers ask you certain questions about your family health (e.g. any known cancer cases for 2 generations or whatever) and it is contract violation and possibly criminal offense to lie. More on this in side note. 4. The very reason a lot of corruption is gotten away with is simply capacity of tax authorities to dig deep, not the clever routing itself. Side note: As far as I have observed, it is more or less cultural habit in Scandinavia to be obsessed with what I call "what would others think?". Practically this surfaces in two areas: 1. being really conservative about what is considered acceptable (count number of house colors in a neighbourhood :) ) 2. attempts to be better than your neighbour, which increases welfare
hkjgkjy 10y ago
I think for non-scandinavians, you just have to accept that this is how we do things up north. There is the principle of being public (offentlighetsprincipen). It states that, if there are no extraordinary reasons to keep government data private (such as threat to somebody's life), the data should be public. The internal revenue authority is a government body, hence it's data should be public. Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Finland (don't know if Denmark applies this system) are all well-functioning societies. I would not be surprised if they are some of the world's most well-functioning places around (which is great for getting shit done, but not always fun and free). Ideas of what is right and wrong in other cultures (such as mainland europeans and americans wish for financial privacy) might not always apply in the culture up north. That's fine.

bjourne 10y ago

> 1. Journalists shouldn't write articles about how person X makes €Xm a year. I disagree. If some CEO says that workers salaries are too high and he himself increased his salary by 50% the last year, that is important for journalists to write about. > 2. Researchers: the data could easily be anonymized. Researches are interested in seeing how different variables correlate with salary. Like gender, age, education level, parents social status and so on. Those correlations can't be made on anonymized data. > 3. Transparency. Why? Just because you say everything else is public isn't a valid reason (to me). You misunderstand. Transparency is about the government being transparent with it's data, not about ME being transparent. I'm allowed to keep as many secrets as I want -- the government is not. For example if the government had records on my sexual preference or political affiliation, I for sure would prefer if that data was public and not kept secret. > 4. Corruption: BS. I would seriously doubt people would be stupid enough to receive “dirty" money and then declare it to the tax authority. A lot of corruption involves one party "gifting" the other something. That kind of corruption has been caught by the tax authority.

charlesdm 10y ago
> A lot of corruption involves one party "gifting" the other something. That kind of corruption has been caught by the tax authority. Like what? A house? You can't really catch cash transactions. I would assume that in developed economies the "easiest" and least transparent way of corruption happening is friends doing each other favours. I.e. person A can influence the granting of permits through his friend, person B. In return for helping person C get a permit, he gets a board seat in the company of person D, via person C.

friendzis 10y ago

1. Should journalists write articles about how company X made €Y in profits last year? What about self-employed/single-person-companies? 2. As it was stated properly anonymized data would only allow faceting by absolute income and researchers are interested in many other facets. 3. I'm not from Norway (know some people there) so might be mistaken, but as far as I understand only 3 things are public: income, asset-value, tax. Income and asset structure (income may be wage or interest, assets might be cash in a sock/bank, shares or a house) are not disclosed. Health insurers ask you certain questions about your family health (e.g. any known cancer cases for 2 generations or whatever) and it is contract violation and possibly criminal offense to lie. More on this in side note. 4. The very reason a lot of corruption is gotten away with is simply capacity of tax authorities to dig deep, not the clever routing itself. Side note: As far as I have observed, it is more or less cultural habit in Scandinavia to be obsessed with what I call "what would others think?". Practically this surfaces in two areas: 1. being really conservative about what is considered acceptable (count number of house colors in a neighbourhood :) ) 2. attempts to be better than your neighbour, which increases welfare

hkjgkjy 10y ago

I think for non-scandinavians, you just have to accept that this is how we do things up north. There is the principle of being public (offentlighetsprincipen). It states that, if there are no extraordinary reasons to keep government data private (such as threat to somebody's life), the data should be public. The internal revenue authority is a government body, hence it's data should be public. Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Finland (don't know if Denmark applies this system) are all well-functioning societies. I would not be surprised if they are some of the world's most well-functioning places around (which is great for getting shit done, but not always fun and free). Ideas of what is right and wrong in other cultures (such as mainland europeans and americans wish for financial privacy) might not always apply in the culture up north. That's fine.