5 ms·
Did you know there are some countries where you can look up anyone's income?
by candiddevmike 3y ago
Did you know there are some countries where you can look up anyone's income?
- hasperdi 3y agoNorway is one
- ta1243 3y agoNorway is the only one. And you can't look up salary, just their total income, which could include say renting out a vacation home or whatever.
- edpichler 3y agoThe only one? Source?
- irrational 3y agoI thought Sweden did the same thing?
- varjag 3y agoTotal taxable income, which depending on your family/health/debt situation can be different from the same base income.
- postexitus 3y agoFinland is another.
- squarefoot 3y agoIncidentally, Norway appears among the countries with the lowest perception of corruption in the world: #4 among 180 countries (0). It would be interesting to look if there is any correlation with other countries where income records are publicly available. 0: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-rank https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-rank
- c0pium 3y agoAll* US government salaries are public record. If you know your neighbors name and department/agency, there’s a good chance you can look them up.
- nine_k 3y agoSalaries are not the entire income. Corruption is usually some income in addition to a salary, but it may still be reflected in the tax record (that is, it's usually some service, board position, etc, not a suitcase full if cash). Thus public tax records give a better transparency picture than salary records.
- bergkvist 3y agoBut you can't look it up anonymously. You have to authenticate with your national ID number, and the person will be notified about who looked up their income.
- orthoxerox 3y agoCan you pay someone to look up this data for you?
- dagw 3y agoThe way they get around this in Sweden at least is that you pay a company to do the look up for you and then no one knows who looked up what or why.
- pseg134 3y ago[flagged]
- occz 3y agoCompletely deranged to try to equate those. Do better
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- occz 3y agoTaxable income is public information in Sweden, and you can basically buy a catalog containing the previous years income for everyone in a given area if you'd like. Stuff like addresses and so on is also public information in Sweden, for what it's worth. This always makes me feel a bit strange when hearing people considering releasing someone's address to be doxxing and something horrible - like you can just look up any person in Sweden, and the societal consequence is that literally nothing happens. Same with the incomes, nothing whatsoever happens from having this be public.
- colmmacc 3y agoI have a very hard time believing that sales-people and trades-people don't take it into considering when negotiating or quoting a price. One of the reasons a car sales person wants to "check your credit" early in the process is to get your credit rating and address - which helps them guess your price sensitivity - and many home services certainly take into account the area you live in even when it is irrelevant.
- sofixa 3y agoYeah, "checking your credit" doesn't exist, really, outside of the US. When making loan decisions, your income and loan totals/history are the main things considered, not an arbitrary score by private third parties that couldn't keep the data safe if their lives depended on it.
- tyoma 3y agoA credit score is determined by your loan totals/history. Every lender needs to assess credit-worthiness in some way, and they resort to the very similar schemes, with minor procedural differences based on cultural factors and historical accident.
- sofixa 3y agoExcept that credit scores in the US include things such as evictions and credit card use, scores going down if you repay a loan in full and other bullshit, which a random bank determining your credit worthiness in France doesn't do. They ask for proof of income, check with Banque de France if you have outstanding debts or if you have failed debt payments, and that's it.
- zwily 3y agoDoes “other countries do it” make it right?