[dtquad]

This isn't true and sounds like something written by terminally online reddit libertarians.

The Black Swan documentary is primarily about sleazy private sector actors in Denmark. The only remotely state affiliated individuals in the documentary is a business man who was a former small city council member and a bankruptcy lawyer who has previously contracted for Danish government organizations. The system worked fine and the Danish equivalent of the FBI, the NSK, already had ongoing cases of investigations into a lot of the uncovered material.

The only "common" tax fraud in Denmark is when a house needs some minor fixing before being put on sale. Many Danish people will pay their friend's friend to do it for them "under the table" and not as formally contracted and taxed work. This is becoming increasingly harder.

However this is far from the massive systemic corruption in many other countries.

[arghwhat]

Or when a restaurant owner inexplexably has really low private food expenditure, or has really low revenue on paper despite being relatively popular, or small companies having a lot of company dinners, or labor workers having a lot of company places to go in their company porsche SUV, or...

The reason regular salaried employees do this less, limited to the kind of sort arbejde ("under the table" labor) you describe is because it has become obscenely difficult to do anything meaningful with sorte penge (untaxed money) - not because people don't want to do more or didn't previously do it.

[absolutelastone]

Seems to me salaried workers would be a category that is more conscientious by self-selection. They are comfortable working within the rules of a system and less willing to take risks such as by violating those rules.

[arghwhat]

Yeah, but that there is such a distinction is a little sad. The use of companies for tax avoidance can also lead to some prejudice against small companies in general, which is unfair to those playing nice.

[DanielHB]

Sweden (and I assume Denmark) has a lot of tax-dodging[1] (just like any other country). The tax code is complex (but not nearly US-complex) and gives plenty of ways to avoid paying tax[2].

But at least the tax agency seems quite keen on investigating abuses. I remember Klarna has to pay a huge fine for trying because of trying to abuse tax loopholes a few years ago.

[1] I define tax dodging as using legal tax loopholes in order to pay less tax. A lot of those tax rules are not even complicated, they were just set up with a specific type of person in mind to let them pay less tax.

[2] The most popular ones that middle class Swedes use are delaying paying property capital gains, 30% tax deduction on loan interest payments, special rules for private pension and using ISK investment accounts (which allow you to avoid capital gains). None of them are illegal, just heavily favor some demographics. It is not that hard for a upper middle class Swede to avoid the maximum 56% income tax rate and the 30% capital gains tax.