[Sardtok]

In Norway you can lookup anyone's tax information. You can see who looks up your tax information, though, it is publicly available as long as you log on to government sites.

So basically everyone's salary from two years back is public information. It is often used by the press to check how much the richest people pay in taxes (or rather how badly they contribute by dodging taxes).

I've never heard of employers using it to check candidates' salaries, though. They usually just ask as part of the interview process.

[earnesti]

> I've never heard of employers using it to check candidates' salaries, though. They usually just ask as part of the interview process.

As a Scandinavian employer, I can tell you that the tax records are very useful. Especially for higher-end roles it is very nice being able to check how much people have been earning from a reliable data source. I'm pretty sure many are using that a lot.

[doktrin]

Norwegian tech salaries are relatively standardised and skew low (sometimes very low) by US standards, so certainly in a decent to good market there isn’t that much burning incentive for a company to volunteer themselves to the front page of VG just to save a handful of crowns.

[trogdor]

It looks like net worth is also public information in Norway. Fascinating!

See “What the tax lists contain?” at https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/forms/search-the-tax-lists/