The defence minister and leader of the Swedish People’s Party, Carl Haglund, has made calls for inheritance tax to be abandoned, during an interview with the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper which was published on Saturday.
Although Haglund has repeatedly expressed his desire in the past to see income tax scrapped, the defence minister now says he intends to begin discussions on the proposal with his coalition colleagues at this summer’s government policy talks.
Under the minister’s plans, the current system of inheritance tax would be replaced with capital gains tax, on the lines of the Swedish model. Sweden abolished inheritance and gift tax in 2004, meaning that inherited property is only taxed when it is sold. The capital gains tax is based on the difference between the purchase and selling price.
Haglund claims that in practice, Sweden’s capital gains tax brings the government equal revenue to Finland’s inheritance tax system. The Finnish government collects around half a billion euros of inheritance tax revenue every year.
The Swedish People’s Party has campaigned for years to abolish inheritance tax. Haglund has said that inheritance tax is often wrongly held up as a tax on the rich, when in fact it hits the majority of Finns at some point.