In Norway you can use American Express, Diner's Club and other credit cards, though the two I mentioned aren't always accepted due to higher fees. The Norwegian airline also has a credit card that's pretty popular and offers cashback or bonus points or whatever and there's something called Trumf which offers cashback at certain stores for debit cards.

Regarding tax I just go to the tax authority's website and declare my expected income, assets, debt etc and my employer gets a "tax card" from them which they use to pay taxes for me. At the end of the year the tax authority does a final calculation, sends me an overview and either returns some money or sends a bill for what I owe. I can overestimate my income if I want to avoid that bill, then the tax return is like a bonus but I personally prefer to operate with a healthy emergency fund so that a $3000 tax bill doesn't really bother me. Usually it's like +-$1000 at the end of the year.