Want to know what tax transparency looks like? Look at Norway

If you take George Osborne’s plan for tax transparency to its natural conclusion, where do you end up? The answer is Norway, where details of every taxpayer’s annual income, wealth and annual tax return are publicly available — and it’s not a new thing. Norwegian tax returns have been publicly available since the 1800s, the idea being that financial transparency is seen a vital part of social democracy. Figures were traditionally released every October in a Yellow Pages-style book, available for anyone to read at the local town hall or tax office.

As the internet evolved, they decided to take things online. The government initially came up with the idea of a searchable database of peoples’ finances which launched in 2005, and which allowed media organisations to reproduce the lists online. Visit, for instance, skattelister.no, a website run by the Norwegian tabloid paper Verdens Gang, on which Norwegians can be listed in order of tax payment.

The annual release of tax returns turned into a frenzy — which some Norwegians referred to as ‘tax-porno’ — as people scrambled to find out just how much that dentist next-door earned, and papers ran their annual analysis of footballers’ and politicians’ incomes.