Swedes can find out each other’s salaries with just one phone call — but there’s a catch

Sweden’s commitment to equality has bred high levels of trust — between both individual citizens and between citizens and the government.

“It is obvious that openness is significant,” Stein Reegard, chief economist at the Norwegian Confederation of Trades Unions, told Reuters last year. “At least for a better-informed public debate about the different levels of wages in society, whether it’s a question of leaders’ wages or equal pay.”

Until recently, Sweden’s government didn’t tell people when their returns were being requested. It was completely anonymous. Imagine searching for the average salary of a given position on the job review site Glassdoor and instead finding the real salaries of actual employees on the payroll — albeit with a little more government bureaucracy involved.

Unlike the IRS, one of the least-trusted government institutions in America, Sweden’s tax agency is among the most-trusted in the country. Citizens generally believe the department runs fairly and has their best interests in mind. Transparency helps reinforce that belief: If everyone can know what everyone else makes, politicians and government officials included, it signals the federal agency as a whole has nothing to hide.

As Reegard pointed out, the added transparency has bled into workplace culture, too.

In 2008, Sweden passed the Swedish Discrimination Act, a law that requires companies of 25 employees or more to issue yearly surveys asking what people make. If they discover a gender wage gap and don’t make an effort to close it, they’ll be forced to pay a fine.