The Finnish Tax Administration aims to digitalise the company founding process

The Finnish Tax Administration is aiming to develop a service with which a foreign company can digitally found a company in Finland. The experiment used both private and public data with consent granted by a company. For example, a company’s publicly registered information from the Finnish Patent and Registration Office could be used by the service.

A digital identity and an electronic authentication method were created for the company representative and company during the experiment. They allowed the company representative to electronically found a company in Finland from outside its borders and to establish an accounting firm clientele without having to enter the information many times into the forms of different operators. The same tools can be used when enhancing the services of Finnish companies.

The trial showed that companies’ services can be improved quickly when company data is, with the company representative’s authorisation, transferred in machine-readable form between different operators.

“The Finnish Tax Administration’s project was the first of Sitra’s IHAN testbed pilots to be completed and it is excellent proof of how services based on the productisation of data can be realised in an agile way without the heavy information integration,” says Juhani Luoma-Kyyny, Leading Specialist at Sitra.

Companies produce over half of Finland’s tax revenue. In Finland, one of the obstacles to the fast growth of companies is that caused by the shortcomings of a basic digital infrastructure. For example, financial or company information cannot be used in the everyday operations of companies and the information does not flow in real time between private and public services. This affects the competitiveness of Finnish companies and especially how attractive Finland is to international companies.

“With a real-time economy, we could facilitate the everyday operations of 400,000 Finnish companies, and decreasing the administrative burden would enhance the companies’ interactions. The data economy technologies we tested make the multi-billion enhancement effects possible,” says Digital Living International Oy’s CEO Pirkka Frosti, who led the experiment together with the Finnish Tax Administration.

Sitra’s IHAN project is building a European fair data economy model that combines a human-centric approach, trust and the principles of sustainable growth. The practical tools and model applications of a fair data economy are collected at ihan.fi that uses the “one-stop-shop” principle to support the service development. The first version of the website was launched in June 2020 and the rest of the features will be published in March 2021.

Read more in the Finnish Tax Administration’s press release (29 October 2020).