A couple of years ago in an attempt to get Finns to spend less (usually unproductive) time in improving their houses themselves and thus perhaps give more people a job, Finland introduced a "work on the house" deduction from taxes which means that you can claim money back from tax if you employ a registered company to clean your house; make repairs to your house or otherwise improve it through their work.

One aim was naturally to avoid using "this guy I know" to do it who would do it without bothering to declare the money he got from you and could then often do it for slightly less (without a receipt) than a company would. I suspect however that in self-reliant Finland a lot of the work was being done  by the house (of flat) owners themselve (certainly except in rare cases, cleaning was).

We fairly immediately discovered some of the snags.

We had once (before this law change) employed a company to do a major clean-up of our house and they arrived with all the specialised equipment they needed; were obviously experts at what they did and did an amazing amount of work in the day they spent.

Since the law change we've employed two companies to do a similar day's work. The first year two young girls turned up with a bucket. The second year one young girl turned up with a bucket (as one was sick). My wife said that they were willing enough (and certainly more willing than me) but that in effect all they did was something she could have done in the same time (in fact that second year she had to work alongside that single girl in order to get the work done at all in the time).

Needless to say prices hadn't gone down and so we were paying more than before for less qualified people; no specialised equipment and less work done in the time and all only because we would now save money because of the tax deduction.

This year our tax deductions for this were so high (as we also had the infamous bathroom repair I wrote about earlier) that I had so put some of the money on my tax papers (as well as them going on my wife's as in previously years) and there I discovered that those tax deductions weren't so great as the government had made out when selling the idea.

- There's a maximum deduction.

- You can only claim for work done not for wood used (our terrace); equipment replaced (that bathroom) or even washing liquid (if they'd brought any).

- You can only claim 60% of the money you've paid out (for *work* done as above)

Or in other words assuming that your marginal rate of tax is 50% which is a reasonable estimate for most people, then you are only saving 30% on the *work part* of the repaiir/cleaning work you have had done.

In fact it's probably less because I am fairly certain the tax deduction only came into play after deducting the first X Euros of such expenses (as what in the car insurance business would be self-risk).

If that all wasn't bad enough, it was reported in yesterday's paper that some people who had employed a company with an official permit to do work were not being granted their household deductions because the company wasn't *also* registered on a second list of companies allowed to do household deduction work. The reply to the paper from the tax authorities about this (and nobody seems to have been told about the need for this second registration) was "we're sorry for the people involved but we can't make an exception for any of them". (What else!).