Anyone can find out how much anyone else is paid.

A list of everyone's net income, net assets, and the tax they had paid could be found in a book on a shelf in the public library.

Then in 2001 this information could be found by looking it up online. You could look it up anonymously.

Then in 2014 you had to login using your national ID number to access this data on the tax authority’s website. This means that the person you looked up could see who had been doing searches on their information. It discouraged the Peeping Toms.

But this has not stopped the whistleblowers reporting things they find suspicious. A tax authority representative said, "We like people to do searches which could help us in investigating tax evasion and the amount of tips that we get has not gone down."

Guess what country this is?

Norway

What if this happened in the U.S.?

The push for more pay transparency via legislation is just getting started in the U.S. Currently, about 1 in 4 workers is covered by some form of U.S. pay transparency legislation. At least 15 states are considering pay transparency laws in 2023.

The U.S. is not planning on having an online database where you can look up someone’s net income, net assets, and paid taxes. Yet.

But what if you knew it was going to be implemented in 3 years? What would you do today to get ready as an employer?

#humanresources #paytransparency #payequity #compensation #rewards #genderpaygap