Last week news published a systematic review of what Norwegian companies paid in tax between 2017 and 2022. Although critics rightly pointed out inaccuracies and some mistakes, well summarized by Finn Kinserdal, with this case news has made an important and necessary contribution to the tax debate . By news providing more information and data to a debate that until now has mostly been about rules, we can all learn more about how the Norwegian tax system actually works for companies. This is key knowledge that, in my opinion, is important to bring out, and that is why I was in contact with news’s journalists ahead of the publication. news should not have said that the tax data are secret, they are not. On the other hand, there is no doubt that these tax data are very difficult to access. A few years ago, I was going to try to find out what the group of a high-profile Norwegian billionaire – who operates in an industry related to property – actually paid in tax. I went to the Swedish Tax Agency’s website where I could find the figures for a single year. After hundreds of manual searches for all the subsidiary companies in the group, I added up the amounts and arrived at a low figure. I compared the figures I found with what the group itself stated as payable tax and discovered that the group reported a much higher amount of tax. I tried to decipher the notes in the accounts to see how they themselves explained the discrepancy. But there was no explanation and in general it was difficult to read and understand the notes in the accounts. The analysis I did for one group for one year has been done by news for all companies over a six-year period. This is important work because it brings numbers and data into a debate which until now has mostly been about rules and law. In addition, news makes this information more accessible to all of us who are not auditors or tax lawyers. There are at least three useful conclusions we can draw from news’s work. The first conclusion is that we need more available data on corporation tax. Norway is proud of its great degree of openness and transparency. If you want to find out how much wealth tax and income tax a person pays, this is easily available through the tax lists. The reason why it was so easy for economists and journalists to come up with revelations and objective criticism of the corona support for businesses was that the authorities gave us all the relevant information summarized in one Excel file. If you had had to go through all the group accounts and read up on the notes to investigate how much the companies received in support, this would never have received attention. It is worth discussing whether Norway should create a searchable register for corporation tax at group level. You can optionally add up on a personal level: If Ola nordmann owns 1% of the shares in company X, then you can, for example, give 1% of the company X tax to Ola nordmann. Such information will probably also reduce polarization in the tax debate: One will discover that the money that the “rich” just have “standing” in their companies is actually ownership in other companies that generate both income and tax. Secondly, news’s data work can give us insight into whether it is the case that some industries pay less corporation tax than others. Many of the companies that have been highlighted operate within property or similar industries. While most companies record each individual sale as operating income on which you then have to pay corporation tax, it is common in real estate to set up a separate limited liability company for each real estate project. And instead of the company selling a property, the company that owns the property project is instead sold. This moves income from company level to share income. Such income must also be taxed at one point or another, so this is not really a tax loophole. But in recent years, more owners have moved to Switzerland to escape the tax on share income. The third conclusion we can draw is that we also need data and figures to understand how the tax system actually works in different countries. news has shown examples of Norwegian groups that pay a lot of tax in total, yet pay little to Norway. Could this be because it is more beneficial to move your income to other European countries – even if these have the same tax rates as Norway? Or is it just a coincidence? It may be that both Norway and neighboring countries have approximately 22% in tax, but that it still makes more sense for the companies to transfer their profits to neighboring countries if these have more generous deductions and depreciation rules. More analysis of news’s tax data can help us understand this better. Corporation tax is a very complicated field, and in order to have a complete overview you should really be an auditor, tax lawyer and tax economist at the same time. Since few of us have all this knowledge alone, we need a public debate about how corporation tax actually works – where we can all learn from each other. news deserves praise for wanting to start this debate. Published 11.06.2024, at 17.14
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Opens an important debate – Speech
