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Tax declarations are public information in e.g. Finland. You can easily find out what your neighbors or colleagues are earning. It's not causing many issues oth

Tax declarations are public information in e.g. Finland. You can easily find out what your neighbors or colleagues are earning. It's not causing many issues other than people having a better negotiation position when e.g. negotiating their salary with employers or having unions do so on their behalf. In Albania, the interesting thing of course is that it is quite a bit less organized as a country and that it has a lot of issues with e.g. corruption, smuggling, etc. So the declared income only tells part of the story and it's all the off the book stuff that is really juicy and interesting. Corruption and tax dodging are highly private activities; just like other things you are not supposed to do. Only an issue if you have something to hide. The right to graft, fraud, and theft are not protected by the UN declaration of human rights or most constitutions. Rather the contrary. But yet they are still widely spread in many countries. Transparency is one way to expose that.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>Corruption and tax dodging are highly private activities >Transparency is one way to expose that. Well yeah sure, but that's not what happened here. The transparency brought by this leak is only in regards to salaried (honest) people's wages, so the people who earn dirty money from corruption, bribes and other illegal activities are not impacted by this at all, as those deals are always off the books, usually in form of cash, maybe crypto nowadays, but often also in real estate or other gifts such as cars, artwork or various favors (I give your construction company this lucrative government contract, and in return your construction company will build my McMansion for free, or, you hire my son/nephew as an exec in your company). So this leak most likely does not affect criminals at all, just people who probably had managed to secure incomes much higher than the median (tech workers, entrepreneurs, etc.)
- deleted 5y ago
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errcorrectcode 5y ago
Good for Finland. In other places, it's not nice to count other people's money, along with their prescriptions, medical conditions, and everything else that other people prefer to keep private. ("Transparency" without control over your own information telling the whole world vs. opt-in sharing.)
- alkonaut 5y ago
  Were prescriptions leaked here? Otherwise where did that come from? The thing is: your money is your money. But our neighbors taxes is our money, and the fact that they were paid correctly is our information. If one starts at that, then yes we count eachothers' money. But it's not as simple as "everyone should know everyones' private information". It's rather that the public part of the information (who pays their taxes properly etc) is public and that, as a negative side effect perhaps, gives the income data away. Who knows, perhaps maintaining public tax ledgers while hiding the actual amounts is something that can be solved technologically by for example a blockchain.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago

>Corruption and tax dodging are highly private activities >Transparency is one way to expose that. Well yeah sure, but that's not what happened here. The transparency brought by this leak is only in regards to salaried (honest) people's wages, so the people who earn dirty money from corruption, bribes and other illegal activities are not impacted by this at all, as those deals are always off the books, usually in form of cash, maybe crypto nowadays, but often also in real estate or other gifts such as cars, artwork or various favors (I give your construction company this lucrative government contract, and in return your construction company will build my McMansion for free, or, you hire my son/nephew as an exec in your company). So this leak most likely does not affect criminals at all, just people who probably had managed to secure incomes much higher than the median (tech workers, entrepreneurs, etc.)

deleted 5y ago
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errcorrectcode 5y ago

Good for Finland. In other places, it's not nice to count other people's money, along with their prescriptions, medical conditions, and everything else that other people prefer to keep private. ("Transparency" without control over your own information telling the whole world vs. opt-in sharing.)

alkonaut 5y ago
Were prescriptions leaked here? Otherwise where did that come from? The thing is: your money is your money. But our neighbors taxes is our money, and the fact that they were paid correctly is our information. If one starts at that, then yes we count eachothers' money. But it's not as simple as "everyone should know everyones' private information". It's rather that the public part of the information (who pays their taxes properly etc) is public and that, as a negative side effect perhaps, gives the income data away. Who knows, perhaps maintaining public tax ledgers while hiding the actual amounts is something that can be solved technologically by for example a blockchain.