Denmark has one of the highest, if not the highest, income tax in the world with a top marginal rate of 61% which it is quite easy to reach. You get a lot for your money but can always argue whether it is enough. Adjustments are always being made. The latest adjustment means that from January 1st 2010 if you have the potential to use the Internet on a digital piece of equipment supplied by your employer (computer, mobile phone etc) then you become liable for a flat rate media tax of 3000Kroner (about 425€) per year. This becomes liable whether or not you use the kit for your own private purposes but if you take home the item for just one night in the year.
As a teacher I have had a PC and then a laptop over the last 12 years. At present I am teaching at a technical college which calls itself a laptop college and prides itself that everything is done digitally. Not surprisingly this tax is raising all sorts of questions from the teachers and there is a widespread mood to leave the laptops at the college every afternoon and pick them up the next morning in order to avoid the tax. People really are determined to avoid the tax if they can though it remains to be seen if that translates into practice. I’m not looking forward to it since it takes my laptop an age to get going so I’m going to have to arrive at the school pretty early in order to be ready in time.
But taking a wider perspective this isn’t going to do my cause of getting teachers to integrate ICT any favours. If they don’t have the opportunity to experiment in the comfort of their own homes expertise is not likely to grow as quickly and the divide between work and play is likely to be intensified at the same time as in other contexts we are investigating the potential of games to enhance learning.
Of course the reality is that laptops and netbooks are getting cheaper all the time and multiple computer ownership is widespread and increasing so in practice teachers will not be going home to a computerless home and with cloud computing they are likely to have easy access to the school network as normal. We have also just had a message that we may have copies of the most common programs and some of the specialist programs we use such as Photoshop on our home computers. So I predict that the tax will have little impact in practice on teachers anyway. Those who have mobile phones as part of their job will likely be less able to avoid it. But it does send out all the wrong signals. That playing is not part of work and that ICT expertise can only be acquired during work time. It will also promote huge sales in home computers simply to duplicate the computing power lying unused at work which in this time of the Copenhagen Climate conference is not a brilliant signal to send. The tax has certainly caused a lot of discussion and therefore necessitated a great deal of work by the tax authorities to explain and clarify (in Danish) who pays and when. The protest has migrated inevitably to Facebook.
Meanwhile I’m still trying to work out whether it would be cheaper for me to buy a netbook privately and assume that it will last me at least two years or to pay the tax. Since I am doing more and more freelance work I even thought that it might be possible to avoid the tax by filing a computer as a business expense but they’ve got that one covered as well.
On the plus side, the tax could help restore a healthier work-life balance!