Cooperation and partnerships

Cooperation in Finland and globally

In the efforts to combat the grey economy, we engaged in active national and international cooperation between the authorities and stakeholders. We have shared information on different phenomena and new methods of operation based on analyses and reports, and trained stakeholders.

We prepared both our own projects and those carried out in collaboration with other authorities as a part of the national action plan for tackling the grey economy and economic crime and participated in the preparation of the action plan to combat organised crime under the leadership of the Ministry of Justice.

The Tax Administration continued its involvement in active international cooperation in 2024. We participated in 165 regularly convening international working groups and projects. The cooperation forums included the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the EU, the Intra-European Organisation of Tax Administrations (IOTA) and the Nordic Agenda.

We played a leading role in the reorganisation of the Nordic Agenda Tax Crime Area and examined the risks highlighted by the joint Nordic risk assessment (NATA2023) and their realisation in the Finnish Tax Administration. Based on this work, we detected a wide range of abuses of systems to commit tax and other economic crimes.

At the international level, we have, for example, also prepared a report on the development of multi-agency supervision of organised crime in the ENFIN cooperation and participated in the preparation of a report on fraud concerning withholding tax at source on dividends at the OECD level.

We offer registers for society

The Incomes Register Unit of the Tax Administration is responsible for two separate registers, the Incomes Register and the Positive credit register.

The Incomes Register is an electronic database that contains information on pay, pensions and benefits paid. In 2024, nearly 270,000 payment providers submitted earnings payment reports to the Incomes Register. The reports concerned about 3.1 million earnings recipients. Benefits payment reports were submitted by nearly 700 payment providers. The reports concerned approximately 3.5 million payment recipients. 370 organisations make use of the Incomes Register in their decision-making. In 2024, income data were shared with data users entitled to access the information 1.1 billion times.

The Positive credit register introduced in spring 2024 is used to collect data on credits and income. The aims of the register include preventing the over-indebtedness of households and improving the ability of creditors to assess the creditworthiness of credit applicants.

The introduction of the Positive credit register was achieved within the planned scope, schedule and budget. Creditors were obliged to report the details of existing consumer credits to the register by 31 March 2024. On 1 April, the register’s e-service for private individuals and a creditors’ interface for requesting credit register extracts were introduced.

In October 2024, the notification of the requested credit register extracts feature was published to enable private individuals to receive a Suomi.fi messages whenever a creditor requests a notification concerning their credit register data.

In December 2024, approximately 12.5 million active credits had been reported to the Positive credit register. The register contained the credit information of around 3.7 million individuals and 267 creditors subject to the reporting obligation. During the year under review, almost five million responses were submitted to credit register extract requests. The Positive credit register has 5 official users and 195 organisations requesting credit register extracts.

Highlights from 2024: We strengthened the taxation capacity of other countries

The international work carried out by the Tax Administration to strengthen the taxation capacity of other countries was reinforced.

This was a highly active year for the development cooperation project carried out with the Tanzanian tax authority. During the year, workshops were organised to develop tax control, improve customer experiences and customer service, and create the principles of digital services. The deputy directors of the local tax jurisdictions received training on the customer encounter model. Our Director General Markku Heikura visited Tanzania in the autumn.

2024 also saw the launch of cooperation with the Kenyan tax administration at the concrete level, with a focus on the development of customer registration. So far, the project has successfully cleaned and updated the customer register of the Kenyan tax administration and prepared a target state for customer registration.

Next, robotics will be applied to facilitate the maintenance of up-to-date register data. While digitalisation and the use of artificial intelligence feature in the vision of nearly every tax administration, the cooperation has revealed that fairly simple robots can also significantly reduce manual labour related to the maintenance of the customer register.

The year also included laying the foundation for future cooperation with the Ukrainian tax administration, focusing on strengthening trust and compliance with international standards. The themes of the work include anti-corruption and anti-money laundering measures, project management, strategy work and the Whole of Government approach.

During the year, the Tax Administration also received funding that enables a completely new operating model, which can be used to implement short-term, rapidly launched cooperation to strengthen the taxation capacity of developing countries. The first training focusing on international information exchange was implemented with the funding in autumn 2024.