A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

Black Swan was a big deal, but this article massively overstates the average Dane's faith in the system. The welfare state is certainly not reverred as a religion, and the current state of it is always a hot discussion topic with pulls in either direction.

Unlike what this article suggests, tax fraud is also relatively common (one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country with such absurdly high taxation did not have tax evasion as a key pastime - although probably not as aggressively as in places like the US), and while heavily frowned upon certainly not seen as the highest form of crime as this article suggests. Well, maybe if you ask the tax agency and the political parties pushing for ever more welfare, both of which push heavily for a cashless society where all financial transactions are fully trackable by them, but I think most would place tax evasion quite far down on the list of significant crimes.

I would instead say that the average Dane is carefree about these issues, not because they are trusting or believe their system is worth religious following, but because the issues experienced there feels quite minor compared to what seems to happen elsewhere in the world. When your concept of a significant natural disaster is a flooded basement, you tend to not worry that much about what happens locally.

This isn't true and sounds like something written by terminally online reddit libertarians.

The Black Swan documentary is primarily about sleazy private sector actors in Denmark. The only remotely state affiliated individuals in the documentary is a business man who was a former small city council member and a bankruptcy lawyer who has previously contracted for Danish government organizations. The system worked fine and the Danish equivalent of the FBI, the NSK, already had ongoing cases of investigations into a lot of the uncovered material.

The only "common" tax fraud in Denmark is when a house needs some minor fixing before being put on sale. Many Danish people will pay their friend's friend to do it for them "under the table" and not as formally contracted and taxed work. This is becoming increasingly harder.

However this is far from the massive systemic corruption in many other countries.

Or when a restaurant owner inexplexably has really low private food expenditure, or has really low revenue on paper despite being relatively popular, or small companies having a lot of company dinners, or labor workers having a lot of company places to go in their company porsche SUV, or...

The reason regular salaried employees do this less, limited to the kind of sort arbejde ("under the table" labor) you describe is because it has become obscenely difficult to do anything meaningful with sorte penge (untaxed money) - not because people don't want to do more or didn't previously do it.

Seems to me salaried workers would be a category that is more conscientious by self-selection. They are comfortable working within the rules of a system and less willing to take risks such as by violating those rules.