Taxpayers are baring all in Norway. The country’s internal revenue authority has released details of most individuals’ tax records that reveal not just their annual income but even — gasp! — their overall wealth. Some are calling it “tax porno.” (No, not “porno tax” … though, come to think of it, that might not be such a bad idea.)

Courtesy of the “skatteliste,” or tax list, Norwegian media outlets know exactly how much movie icon Liv Ullman, for example, made last year, as well as her total wealth, reports the Associated Press. The figures were $17,300 and $2.5 million, if you must know. Seem a bit low? The skatteliste doesn’t include information about income earned or kept abroad — which, from my emphatically non-Norse point of view, is just about the best incentive you can imagine to not ever, ever make or keep any of your money in the land of the fjords.

If you’re thinking that, fascinating though this piece of Scandinavian social-democratic egalitarianism may be, it’s not likely to catch on here (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter), I’m not about to disagree. But for me this story was an uncomfortable reminder that from time to time here in the United States we do hear calls for regulations that would force companies to lay bare their tax returns for public inspection, and which would inevitably raise issues that parallel those surrounding Norway’s experiment in see-through tax compliance.

The name most recently associated with the idea is that of Mark Everson, former Commissioner of the IRS, who about this time last year argued in a Washington Post column that “significantly increasing business transparency could immediately improve the way private-sector entities calibrate risk and deal with each other. A proper starting point is to make corporate tax returns available to the public, not just to the IRS.”

It’s significant that Everson made this plea specifically in the context of the 2008 financial sector breakdown. The bare-it-all proposal does tend to raise its head in times of economic turmoil. Back in 2002, in the wake of the dot-com collapse and in the midst of the accounting scandals, Senator Charles Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, was pressing Treasury and the SEC to determine whether “there would be a benefit to shareholders and employees in requiring corporate tax returns (or a summary version) to be publicly available.” Once President Obama’s tax reform program gets under way in earnest, there may well be a resurgence of such questions.

If Everson and his ilk had their way, would the urge to protect tax privacy nudge prudish U.S. companies to shift even more of their money overseas? Quite possibly, though the administration’s tax initiative is set to make the offshore option distinctly less attractive on other counts.

But there are other reasons to oppose this type of disclosure. In Norway, snooping into your neighbors’ financial affairs via the skatteliste is fast becoming a new national pastime. Similarly, if your company’s tax returns were online courtesy of the IRS, you can bet that your competitors would be all over them in search of whatever nuggets they could find, and that might well include information about your business strategies. And, of course, the snoopers wouldn’t be just U.S.-based firms; your overseas competitors would be digging around in there, too.

Then there’s the media madness factor. Norway’s press milks the tax data to the max. Why should they worry if kids get teased about their parents’ income on the school playgrounds? After all, if the government doesn’t care about protecting citizens’ privacy, why should they? If U.S. corporate tax returns go public, it would be just as much of a media frenzy, of course, with this difference: Given the complexity of companies’ tax positions, it’s a near certainty that the information would be distorted or deliberately misrepresented for political purposes. It’s challenging enough for companies’ highly expert tax departments to understand and comply with the code — indeed, it’s hard enough for the IRS itself to understand it — so you can imagine what your average reporter or member of the public would make of a complex corporate tax position.

Brave though it may be, Norway’s experiment is bound to seem shocking to non-Scandinavian eyes. The same should be true of U.S. calls for full-frontal corporate tax disclosure. Even in the age of transparency, there’s a case for privacy. ###