This story comes from our Norwegian Correspondent, Mr. Arnt-Erik Hansen (former IAIDQ Director of Member Services). We let him tell his tale in his own words, with only minor editing….

++++

Norway is the only country in the world, as far as I know, with full transparency with regards to personal income, wealth and state tax. One of the big Autumnal Entertainments in Norway is the annual publication of the list of taxpayers, their incomes, and the amount of tax they have paid. . Here you can search for your neighbor, your friends, enemies, public companies or government officials to find what their income was, how much they contributed to the state and how wealthy they are. On October 20, 2010 the list was published on the internet

Newspapers, TV, and blogs (including this one) find this a great event to generate stories.  Every year there are stories about the person earning the least and the most. Not only that, they compare a person’s income to the average income in the country, according to your age. They will even go as far as determining the street in Norway with the lowest average income. This is business intelligence on real live data.

However the Norwegian tax authorities are not immune to data quality problems. Here are some of the stories I read in the newspapers today (all online of course [editor: Links to the stories will be posted here soon])

A polish citizen, address in Polen and with a modest Norwegian income is reported to have paid more than 119’000’000 Norwegian Kroner (approx US$20.4 million, or €14.6million ) in taxes for 2009. As a consequence he can claim to be the biggest contributor to the state coffers. Thanks Polen, I am sure that someone will be there to collect the money soon.

This is of course wrong and the reason is, most likely, that someone punched in the wrong number – a number with too many zeros. We’ll call this “The Fat Finger Zero Error“.

Apart from errors in the data itself, there appear to be errors in the actual interpretation of the data. For example, a lady working as a cleaner got a tax claim of no less than 84’005’501 Norwegian Kroner (€10.3million or US$14.4million). Her income for 2009 was reported by one newspaper to be 324’000 (US$55,600, or €39,818) so this is an obvious error. Another newspaper reported her income to be 240’000.

A key question is: What has happened here?

The answer from the tax authorities when asked to comment on this was simply – errors happen, unfortunately, and will be corrected immediately. However, the reason was, most likely, that someone punched in the wrong number – a number with too many zeros. Well, seems that someone has a problem with zeros.

There is another story to come about the “Fat Finger Zero” error.  But first we need to share some insight into the tax reporting and collection process in Norway works.

It’s not too different to any other country. Except in Norway the State sends you your forms filled in with the information the tax authorities have about you and you simply have to sign them and send them back.  And, like most tax authorities, they most likely know more about you than yourself.

For instance, banks in Norway send megabytes of data about all customers and their accounts to the tax authorities. Which leads us to our third IQTrainwreck example in this story…

This year two banks managed to put zeros behind the customer account balances instead of in front for 500 customers.  So €00000500 became €500,0000.

A possible root cause: the definition of the attributes in the file has gone astray.

But from two banks?

Or was the requirement wrong?

It  seems that Norway has a problem with zeros.

Oh, almost forgot to mention – today the Norwegian State Fund was valued above the 3’000 Billion mark for the first time. That’s 3’000’000’000’000 Norwegian Kroner (US$514,610,220,303).

I think I understand the problems with zeros. (But how much of that is due to tax collection errors? – the sting in the tail for Norwegian tax payers is that if there is an error in their tax calculations they have to pay the decided amount and then are refunded the amount of any error).

PS! If you look up my name you will find income 0, wealth 0 and taxes 0. The reason: I lived in Switzerland in 2009 and in that country you are invited to pay taxes and it is not a criminal offence if you don’t tell the state everything.