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Comment by plebu | Hacker News Reader

This article is very misleading. They neglected to mention that in Norway your taxes are public information. The tax list is published in the newspapers and online. Anyone can see what everybody else earned and paid in taxes.

Update: 2011 Norwegian Tax List http://skattelister.no/skatt/

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That does not change the fact that Altinn (the website) is a portal for over 700 forms, ranging from changing your home address, signing student loan contracts and applying for social services.

Taxes aren't everything and I really do not care if people see how much money I make, but when something like this happens this easily (this is not the first case of problems with Altinn, although not so severe before) you begin to worry, is accepting the lowest bidding contractor really is the best option for a website that holds the information for nearly every citizen of Norway the best idea?

But on the other hand if the website was run by the private sector the company would have faced bankruptcy a long time ago and we would all be filing our taxes on paper :-/

I do not know what is worse, I would prefer they at least separated different systems so that we did not have a SSO solution for everything. I would much rather have one for taxes, one for forms and documents and one for whatever else, separated by the level of severity if they were to be broken into, or in the case something like this were to happen.

Agreed.

This posting is very misleading. It neglects to mention that in Norway, your tax return is not public. Only your income, your net worth and what you paid in taxes.

Didn't mean to mislead you. I just stated that anyone can see what you earned and paid in taxes.

That's not quite true either. The public figures are tax paid and net worth; the income numbers that you see are reverse-engineered from tax paid and the code, and may be inaccurate.

The totals are public, but not your entire tax report. And since this guy could represent his company, all the tax details of his company was also available.

I think the biggest issue is that this bug raises serious questions about the whole implementation of the site.

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