Tax Online

The outgoing Italian government’s parting shot was to publish details of every Italian’s tax declaration on the web. Obviously I’m horrified that such a huge quantity of confidential information was released by a government in such a cavalier fashion,¹ but I can’t help but think that there must be more to the story than we’re seeing in the BBC’s report.

I’m quite prepared to believe that the outgoing government might want to make a point by rolling out the site before it left office, but the government surely couldn’t have put together a site on that scale from scratch in the fortnight since it lost the election. Was the surprise at the notion of putting the information out there, or at the fact that the site had been rolled out early? Or was the real surprise how interested the Italian public apparently was in this information?

[Via Qwghlm]

1. That said, there’s a small part of me that is amazed that people get so up in arms about the possibility that other people will find out how much they earn. I’ve never understood why this is seen as such a sensitive issue. For the record, my gross salary last month was £1,359.25. ↩