Field Notes

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Public information on individual income taxes

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The Finnish Tax Administration’s (Vero) official guidance on what individual taxpayers’ public tax information contains and how it may be consulted, governing the annual November publication under the Act on the Publicity and Confidentiality of Taxation Information (1346/1999). The saved snapshot is the live page, with the .raw.html companion kept as the provenance copy.

What the page establishes

Finland is, with Norway and Sweden, one of the few countries that publishes personal tax data by law: name, year of birth, county of domicile, taxable earned and capital income, taxes collected, and refunds or back taxes — for every individual taxpayer, with no right to be removed.

But Finland’s access architecture keeps the data practically obscure:

  • Vero does not publish the information online; it is viewable only at customer terminals in tax offices, where nothing can be printed, copied, emailed, or saved — and where browsing requires no authentication and is not recorded;
  • or it can be requested by telephone;
  • printed extracts require an accepted purpose and a fee;
  • the public data never includes the personal identity code (henkilötunnus), address, or family details.

Media outlets receive the dataset electronically for journalistic purposes, and the Supreme Administrative Court held in December 2022 that taxpayers cannot oppose that disclosure. Media-run tax lookup portals (Helsingin Sanomat, Ilta-Sanomat) were upheld by the Data Protection Ombudsman in 2021 and by administrative courts in 2023 under the GDPR’s journalistic exemption — Finland’s narrower parallel to Sweden’s media-shield debate.

Limitations

The page describes current administrative practice; the media-portal rulings concern portals showing exactly this limited dataset, which carries no addresses, judgments, or identifiers. Finland’s openness is real but bounded to income facts.

Significance for the wiki

Finland shows the third Nordic settlement: publish income data by statute, but strip identifiers, fence access behind terminals and purpose checks, and leave journalism its channel. The comparison demonstrates that Sweden’s problem is not tax publicity but the identifier-and-dossier layer around it. Anchors the Finnish row of Public-by-default identity in international comparison.

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