All tax records are public in Finland, and it’s again that time of the year where media goes through them and checks who has earned how much. You can go check how much your neighbor or workmate earns if you want to.
Are tax records public in other countries?
Not in the UK
Not in the US, although politicians have gotten into the habit of releasing theirs to the public.
It looks like they’re public in Norway. Edit: Sweden too. Odd regional custom, I guess.
They are in Norway, but because of the huge difference between it being possible to go and look them up at the town hall, and being able to search them at home on your computer, they are now access restricted requiring you to identify yourself before searching.
In the same interface you can then check to see who, if any, have looked up your records.
In the USA (and Canada) it seems money is the last taboo, even more than discussing death or who’s boinking whom. Tax records are seriously private. Asking someone like a celebrity how much money they make, how much they have in the bank, etc. is “just not done”. With that atmosphere of privacy around income, no surprise tax returns are shielded by law. Note that of all the government leaks, the closest we come to a tax leak for Trump (a) did not come from the government, it looks like someone in his or his accountant’s office and (b) very incomplete. Also note the serious dispute over how much Trump is actually worth - all guesstimates (and possibly boasting).
Perhaps part of it too is that when the huge profits from liquor business disappeared at the end of prohibition, a lot of crooks turned to kidnapping for profit. So there was a tradition from the added incentive to hide one’s net worth if rich.
Although this is correct for tax records … publically traded corporations do have to make public their financial statements … certainly not the exact same thing but just how hard would it be to figure out what the taxes are … [giggle] …
Tax records are not public, but in California (and I suspect other states) salary records for state employees are public; you can search any of the 300,000 or so state employees by name and see their salary history.
Most real estate property tax records in the US are public.
Was going to say, official real estate records are often directly online, and via Zillow you can look up anybody you come across whose address you know and see whether or not they are owner/resident of an expensive house. However most people who own investment properties do it in LLC’s so it’s not as easy to find out about real estate wealth beyond personal residences (or even in some cases those too are in LLC’s, and it’s not as common for public records, online ones at least, to give the owners).
Besides government employees, the compensation of senior managers of publicly traded companies is in their financial statements, sometimes going well below just the CEO.
All of them, not just most. Though there are no tax records for real property that is not subject to taxation, of course (i.e. owned by the state or the federal government).