The worsening economic situation is reflected in an increase in the number of financial crimes and bankruptcies, and rising tax debt, Finnish tax authorities said on Tuesday.
The Tax Administration published a survey of its monitoring of the grey economy and white-collar crime last year. It said that police logged a record number of financial crimes last year.
According to tax officials, nearly 2,400 financial crimes came to the attention of the police, about 15 percent more than the previous year and the highest ever on record. More than half of these were related to debt, taxes and/or accounting.
Altogether, officials uncovered 95 million euros in unreported income and 16 million in undeclared wages. Some 13 million euros' worth of falsified documents were found.
Cases involving misuse of benefits from the social insurance institute Kela that led to police investigations totalled 3.8 million euros. The misuse of Kela benefits was often linked to shadow economy phenomena such as undeclared wages and falsified documents, the Tax Administration said in a press release.
"Smaller operators in the shadow economy"
"Changes in working life from traditional employment relationships to platform economy, light entrepreneurship and forced entrepreneurship have led to a situation where smaller and smaller operators are engaged in the shadow economy," said Janne Marttinen, head of the grey-economy unit at the Finnish Tax Administration.
Meanwhile there were approximately 3,300 bankruptcy applications last year, a quarter more than the previous year.
There was a smaller number of applications for company reorganisation, but these also rose sharply, up by nearly one-third from 2022. The Tax Administration's enforcement authority collected nearly 1.2 billion euros, the second-highest haul ever.