Slashdot: Norway, the Country Where No Salaries Are Secret

Norway, the Country Where No Salaries Are Secret
Published on July 22, 2017 at 06:00AM
In Norway, there are no such secrets. Anyone can find out how much anyone else is paid — and it rarely causes problems. From a report: In the past, your salary was published in a book. A list of everyone’s income, assets and the tax they had paid, could be found on a shelf in the public library. These days, the information is online, just a few keystrokes away. The change happened in 2001, and it had an instant impact. “It became pure entertainment for many,” says Tom Staavi, a former economics editor at the national daily, VG. “At one stage you would automatically be told what your Facebook friends had earned, simply by logging on to Facebook. It was getting ridiculous.” Transparency is important, Staavi says, partly because Norwegians pay high levels of income tax — an average of 40.2 percent compared to 33.3 percent in the UK, according to Eurostat, while the EU average is just 30.1 percent. “When you pay that much you have to know that everyone else is doing it, and you have to know that the money goes to something reasonable,” he says. “We [need to] have trust and confidence in both the tax system and in the social security system.”