GARRI RAAGMAA ⟩ It's beyond a joke – a quarter of Estonia's residents don't live at their registered address

There was a time when allegedly all Tallinn mayors, notably and particularly Edgar [Savisaar – ed.], lived at a greater or lesser distance from the capital. Now there's talk that members of the city council have been caught misrepresenting their residency data. What news! Journalists have work to do, and people have fun.

It's beyond a joke, however, because in some areas, a quarter more or a quarter less people actually spend their nights than what the Population Register shows. Tallinn, in particular, benefits from this, as rural residents and suburbanites register as residents there for free bus, tram, trolleybus and train rides, reduced land tax, or a school or kindergarten place. Since municipalities receive income tax on their residents based on Population Register data, Tallinn is getting tens of millions of euros extra in this way. True, some of those who have registered as residents of the city actually work or study there. In other words, they commute from the place where they sleep to the city center and back on workdays. About 350,000 – 400,000 people spend time in more than one municipality every day.

And then there's the army of summer citizens, people who are Saaremaa, Hiiumaa, Setomaa or Võru County residents during the summer, who commute not just in the summer, but about every weekend when the weather is fine to where the there are lazy meadows in the sun. Flowers and birds and all sorts of hobbies too, of course. In Estonia, no one has yet been able to count the number of second-home owners, but in Norway almost half the population has a cabin somewhere in the mountains. Or two.

They say there have been several attempts to make living at several addresses official, but these attempts have not succeeded. So that there would officially be several places of residence, and a corresponding percentage of income tax would be paid to the municipality for the use of infrastructure. Logical, isn't it?

In Belgium, the police will show up and see if you actually live where you claim to be living.

Some population scientists are against, believing that a person must have a permanent place of residence. Long time series of data have already been collected, models are running smoothly – and completely redoing everything would be quite a task. Since the Population Register is not reliable, Statistics Estonia has been working to spot people's actual life signs already for some time: by determining the permanent residence based on where people are most active.

The 2021 census changed the algorithm for determining the permanent place of residence, resulting, for example, in a nine percent decrease in the population of Hiiumaa. Summer residents who have registered there to support Hiiumaa or buy ferry tickets at half the price were removed from the statistics. They weren't removed from the Population Register, though – they can still cross by ferry at half the price, and the budget of the Hiiumaa municipality also remains bigger. That's why making living at multiple addresses official does not suit some municipalities.

Residence data could be easily garnered through mobile phone positioning: as soon as you cross the border of the municipality of your second or third home, the income tax starts to go there. This, however, is not allowed by the GPTR and other vile data protection regulations. Although Meta, Google and even the Chinese Tik-Tok monitor us 24/7, and most let data on themselves to be collected for the services they receive, for some reason this is not allowed to be done by the state.

Although population officials say that we have a nice liberal country where the government trusts its people, it's obvious that that trust is being exploited pretty much for self-interest. Politicians are doing it, and people are following suit. But how to plan a state if the same state and municipalities do not know where their people actually live? In Belgium, the police will show up and see if you actually live where you claim to be living. This was also the case in prewar Estonia.