COMMENTARY: EU ponders public access to Finnish tax records
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By Perttu Kauppinen
The judges of the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Communities have embarked on a giraffe hunt.
Officially the court was to have decided whether or not a wholesaler of fresh peas is in violation of the law on personal information with the sideline business of publishing the tax records of a million Finns in a magazine and as an SMS service.
The key issue is the SMS service, as the circulation of the magazine, sold in the early part of the year, is insignificant.
The SMS service, on the other hand, operates year-round. For a fee of a couple of euros it allows anyone to check how much money the engineer who lives next door, who just bought a new car earns.
And now on to the giraffes.
In order to determine what is legal, the court must decide what is journalism. Is a mere list of people's income data enough to qualify as financial journalism?
The EU's directive on data protection would clearly ban a text message service offering a neighbour's tax information for sale. The problem is that information collected for journalistic purposes can be republished in a new form, and resold - in the form of an SMS message, for instance.
So if the Veropörssi publication, which contains tax information, counts as journalism, the same tax information can be sold as text messages.
Defining journalism is not at all easy. According to a dictionary definition, journalism is the output of the editors of a medium, but an old saying has a better definition.
According to the saying, journalism is like a giraffe. It is nearly impossible to describe exactly, but when you see it you'll definitely recognise it.
Could it be the cold climate, but no agreement has been reached among Finns on the external points of recognition of this giraffe - even though the argument has been going on for more than a decade.
Data Protection Ombudsman Reijo Aarnio consulted with journalists and concluded that tax lists alone are not journalism. However, the Data Protection Board and the Helsinki Administrative Court disagreed.
The Supreme Administrative Court, for its part, did not trust its own animal recognition skills, and asked for help from the Court of Justice.
In February the court listened to oral arguments, and the decision was scheduled for November - appropriately just before tax information from last year.
If the Court of Justice agrees the view of the Data Protection Ombudsman, Finnish data protection will improve by the breadth of a hair of a giraffe. However, in that case more will be lost in wage equality than is gained in data protection.
Checking the tax records is, in practice, the only way that an employee can be sure that he or she is being paid equally to that of his or her fellow workers.
The law requires employers to promote pay equality. However, information on individual pay is not usually made available to employees even when drawing up local wage agreements. One simply has to rely on the word of the employer on what is fair and what is equal.
If SMS messages on taxation disguised as journalism are banned, the tax authorities should establish their own electronic tax information service - preferably free of charge.
If this were to happen, it would be possible to see exactly how much the pea wholesalers Tommi Anttila and Tommi Mäkitalo themselves get from their tax information business. For some reason the income information of the two is not to be found on their own text message service.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 26.2.2008
PERTTU KAUPPINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
perttu.kauppinen@hs.fi
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| 26.2.2008 - THIS WEEK |
 COMMENTARY: EU ponders public access to Finnish tax records |
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