Viking Magazine - April 2010 - 39

and income directly on your PC or
on your smartphone, " Skåra says.
The apps were the top-selling iTunes
download in Norway that month.
" That's not journalism, " Skåra adds.
" That's just a way of making money. "
The Association of Norwegian
Editors, the Norwegian Journalists
Union, and others in the country's
media industry have been among the
most vocal champions of unlimited
public access to the tax lists. They
argue that it's essential for free and
open debate of social issues and sustaining
a democratic society.
Opponents say the media's main
concern is commerce: selling more
newspapers or pusing more traffic to
their Web sites to support the sale of
more advertising space.
Tybring-Gjedde has co-authored
a proposal to the Storting that would
require the government to restrict
access to the tax lists and strike some
balance between freedom of speech
and democratic debate on one side,
and an individual's right to privacy
on the other. The proposal, backed
by Fremskrittsparti, has been under
debate in the Finance Committee
this winter. Besides privacy rights, the
proposal warns that criminals will use
tax lists to target the wealthy, and that
income information will be used to
humiliate or harrass people.
Some tax-list checking
is good-natured rivalry. Storting
representative Lars Egeland
laughs at a family joke:
My
brother is a
businessman
and, of course,
we check each other. One
year, he didn't pay much
tax at all. So I gave my
son 50 CROWNS and
said, 'Go and visit your
uncle and give him
some money, he doesn't
have anything.' "
" Zero-Tax Contributors "
Those are red herrings, says Lars
Egeland, a Storting representative
for SV-the Sosialistisk Venstreparti,
or Sosialist Leftist Party-and,
like Tybring-Gjedde, a member
of the Finance Committee.
Police testified before the
committee that they have no
definitive evidence of tax lists
being used in crime, he says.
As for privacy, " Money and
power go very tightly together, "
Egeland says. " It's important to
know who has much money,
and then you can perhaps know
who has a lot of power. "
SV opposed a change in
property tax law last fall.
The party showed-thanks
in part to the tax lists-that
26 of Norway's 33 billionaires
" would have been zero-tax
contributors " if the
change had been enacted and
given them a property tax
loophole, he says. In fact, the
now commonplace phrase
nullskatteytere, or zero-tax
contributors, " wouldn't exist
if the lists were not public, "
Egeland adds.
Does Adding
Analytics Help
SPUR
DEBATE?
The raw numbers in context.
" You can use my records-
they're public! " says Ove Skåra of
Norway's Data Inspectorate. He's
opposed to publicly accessible
tax records, but an accommodating
instructor to anyone who
wants to understand how the
system works. He directs a Viking
visitor to his records as they're
shown at www.dagbladet.no.
Skåra points out that most
Web sites with a portal to the
tax database offer various tools
for sorting, parsing and making
comparisons with the data. In
2008, Ove Skåra (born in 1961,
the record shows) reported
income of 641,271 kroner, net
worth of 234,087 kroner, and
paid taxes of 254,507 kroner.
Dagbladet's analytical tools compare
Skåra's numbers with those
of other residents of Bærum, the
west-Oslo suburb where he lives.
" They say that I earn 87 percent
more than the average in
Bærum and my tax is 95 percent
more than the average in
Bærum, but my [net worth] is 69
percent less than the average in
Bærum, " Skåra observes. " There
are lots of rich people living in
Bærum, and ... they know how
to handle their money to pay as
little tax as they can. "
Seeing this comparison, even
an opponent of open tax records
such as Skåra admits that it
provides some meaningful information.
If all the comparisons
provided this kind of information,
he says, " Then you can have a
debate about the tax system. "
-D. L.
A pri l 2010 V I K I N G 39
http://www.dagbladet.no
Viking Magazine - April 2010

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