(1) Direct cost refers to the tax design cost of the tax department (including the design and publicity of tax laws and related policies, etc.). ), the cost of tax collection and the investigation cost of carrying out tax inspection and handling illegal cases.
(2) Indirect costs refer to the expenses borne by relevant social departments, groups and organizations for the government to organize taxes. Refers to the cost paid by taxpayers to fulfill their tax obligations. Tax costs mainly include the following aspects:
(1) Conduct tax registration, set up account books, record and calculate income and cost expenditures according to the requirements of the tax law;
(2) the time, energy and money spent on hiring accountants or tax consultants to file tax returns;
(3) the manpower, material resources, financial resources, time and energy spent in paying taxes;
(4) Tax planning for reasonable tax avoidance and expenses incurred in tax disputes.
(5) Learning costs arising from understanding the tax system. Generally speaking, the cost of paying taxes is much higher than that of the government. 1, the current tax rate is too complicated. At present, China adopts differential tax rate, not single tax rate, but more progressive tax rate, which will directly increase the complexity of the tax system. For example, China's current personal income tax system stipulates three different tax rates for different income items, namely, wage income is subject to 9-level excess progressive tax rate, individual industrial and commercial households' production and operation income and enterprises' contracted and leased operation income are subject to 5-level excess progressive tax rate, and other taxable income is subject to 20% proportional tax rate. Although the adoption of progressive tax rate is beneficial to realize the fairness of tax burden, it greatly increases the complexity and cost of tax collection and management. Moreover, the progressive tax rate will also produce a high marginal tax rate, which also urges taxpayers to invest a lot of time and money to study tax avoidance to a certain extent, thus increasing their tax payment costs.
2. The tax design is subjective and arbitrary, and too little consideration is given to the current tax collection and management conditions. 1994 since the reform of the tax-sharing system, the interpretation of tax laws is arbitrary, and some even go beyond tax laws and regulations as administrative interpretation. For example, some provinces change the legal rate of VAT and set the withholding rate of VAT; Some extend the income tax relief enjoyed by welfare enterprises to township enterprises; The tax rate of some small-scale VAT taxpayers is 6%, and the billing rate is 17% (remainder, 1996). This weakens the seriousness and standardization of tax law to a certain extent, artificially causes the variability and complexity of tax law, brings a lot of inconvenience and trouble to tax collection and management, and increases the cost of tax collection and management.
3. The continuity of tax policy is not strong, and changes are too frequent, resulting in a lot of waste of manpower and material resources. For example, in less than a year from 2000 to 200 1, State Taxation Administration of The People's Republic of China revised the pre-tax deduction standard of advertising fees in some industries twice, that is, the original pre-tax deduction (except for special enterprises) was changed to the "2%" standard introduced in 2000 (advertising fees within 2% of sales income can be deducted according to the facts). 200 1 increase the actual deduction standard of furniture and building materials malls, real estate development, medicine and other enterprises to 8% of sales revenue. 3. Frequent changes in tax policies not only increase the difficulty of tax collection by tax authorities, but also greatly increase the tax payment cost of taxpayers.
China's current tax collection and management system is unreasonable.
1. Inconsistent tax agency settings.
1994 after the tax reform, China has set up two sets of tax agencies, the national tax agency and the local tax agency. Although this has a certain effect on ensuring the tax revenue of the central and local governments, it has greatly increased the tax cost. Local governments and local tax bureaus set up inspection sub-bureaus, collection and management sub-bureaus and tax service halls respectively, which not only increases the cost of infrastructure, but also increases the cost of tax collection and management. Taxpayers also have to go to the tax service halls of national tax and local tax respectively to declare and pay taxes, which increases the tax cost. Moreover, the national tax and local tax inspection sub-bureaus have to conduct tax inspections separately according to their respective tax management authority, which leads to the repeated inspection of the same enterprise by the national tax and local tax authorities, which not only increases the burden of the enterprise, increases its tax payment cost, but also increases the inspection cost of the tax department.
2. The layout of tax agencies is unreasonable.
At present, the tax collection agencies set up according to administrative divisions in China have little connection with the economic tax sources. In underdeveloped areas with insufficient and scattered economic tax sources, it will lead to high cost and low efficiency to set up the same tax collection agencies as those in economically developed areas. For example, in Longyan City 12 mountain sub-bureaus, in 2003, the annual tax revenue was insufficient 1 10,000 yuan, 6 sub-bureaus had less than 5 general taxpayers, and 5 sub-bureaus had no 1 taxpayer to reach the threshold; According to the "one-window" management mode and the management requirements of the anti-counterfeiting tax control system of the general VAT taxpayer, the general taxpayer only has 1 branch to carry out data integration, one window is set with two windows and the anti-counterfeiting tax control system is installed, so that the tax cost of these 12 branches in the city remains high, which violates the principle of cost-effectiveness. 1, taxpayers' tax awareness and legal awareness are not strong. Taxpayers lack the consciousness of consciously fulfilling their tax obligations, and even use various ways to evade taxes, which increases the cost of tax authorities' collection and investigation. In 2002, China tax authorities investigated and dealt with major cases through special inspections, and paid back 35 billion yuan in taxes.
2. The tax authorities have a weak concept of tax cost. For a long time, due to the influence of the traditional planned economy system and extensive management mode, government departments at all levels have paid insufficient attention to the issue of tax cost, and often only paid attention to the completion of tax revenue, ignoring tax expenditure. The assessment of tax authorities mainly focuses on business indicators, but often does not include tax cost indicators. Starting from the goal of increasing tax revenue, the tax authorities have invested a lot of manpower and material resources to strengthen tax collection and management, formulated a strict tax collection and management system, and controlled tax payment behavior from all aspects, which greatly increased the cost of tax collection and management, and cumbersome and overlapping regulations also increased the difficulties of taxpayers, thus increasing the cost of tax payment.
3. The tax authorities have failed to abide by the law, and the law enforcement is lax. At present, China's audit management system is not perfect, and it also lacks the necessary restriction mechanism. Tax fraud occurs from time to time, human tax and relationship tax are repeatedly banned, the national tax revenue is seriously lost, and the tax cost is increased.
4. Foreign countries interfere heavily in tax work. Some regions and departments, out of local interests, arbitrarily reduce or exempt taxes, preventing tax authorities from collecting taxes according to law, resulting in the artificial loss of tax revenue and increasing tax costs. According to statistics, in 2000, more than 600 illegal tax-related documents were found, involving more than 654.38+09 billion yuan in violation of the tax system.
5. The tax authorities lack strong cooperation with other relevant functional departments. In order to strictly control taxpayers' operating conditions and crack down on tax evasion, it is necessary for tax authorities, industry and commerce, customs and other functional departments to cooperate with each other and share data. In particular, the information on the operating conditions of enterprises held by the above-mentioned competent departments can provide great convenience for tax supervision. However, at present, the tax authorities and relevant functional departments such as industry and commerce, banks and customs are still unable to share data, and each spends a lot of manpower and material resources to collect data, which greatly increases the information cost of the tax authorities.