Study Of The Reform Of Environmental Protection Tax In China

<Environmental Protection Tax Law of the People’s Republic of China>（hereinafter referred to as Environmental Protection Tax Law）was passed on the 25th session of the standing committee of the 12^th National People’s Congress,and was enforced from 1^stJanuary,2018.The introduction of Environmental Protection Tax Law aims at resolving various kinds of abuses of the old system of Pollutant Charge.But heated discussions exist in academic circle on the question if the Environmental Protection Tax Law can achieve its aim.On this background,I made a research on the implementation of Pollutant Charge in Yi Chang city,Hu Bei province.Based on the data of Pollutant Charge collection and environmental monitoring in recent 11 years,I studied the effects of Pollutant Charge system and summarized its effects and problems.I further compared and analyzed Environmental Protection Tax against Pollutant Charge,and studied the improvements and problems of Environmental Protection Tax Law.From the data about collection and use of Pollutant Charge in Yi Chang city in recent 11 years,I found that although the revenue of Pollutant Charge kept growing,the energy conservation and environmental protection expenditure was far more than the revenue of Pollutant Charge.From the data about environmental monitoring in Yi Chang city in the period of Pollutant Charge collection,I found no obvious improvement of overall environmental quality.It suggests that the introduction of Pollutant Charge system was unsatisfactory.I think the reason lies on the disadvantages of Pollutant Charge system:firstly,its system level was not high enough and its law source was scattered;secondly,its system design was imperfect,such as vague definition of fee payers,over low collection standards,narrow scope of charge,undefined preferential policy,undefined regulations about revenue distribution and use,and fee collection;thirdly,on the supervisory mechanism,verification collection provided space of power rent-seeking.Environmental Protection Tax Law partly solved these problems.On system level,“fee-to-tax”upgraded system level and further unified the law source.On system design,Environmental Protection Tax Law sets upper limit of tax rate,details preferential policy,defines revenue distribution,adds regulations of collection and management.On supervisory mechanism,two departments of environmental protection and taxation share responsibilities,which can compress the space of power rent-seeking.But there are still problems existing in Environmental Protection Tax Law.On system design,there exists unfair collection method,unreasonable tax rate,narrow scope of charge,broad range of tax preference,undefined method of revenue usage.On taxation management,government faces problems such as higher collection cost,difficulties of cross-departmental collaboration,low consciousness of tax payment among enterprises and lack of professionals in taxation administration.I offered perfecting suggestions to above problems.On system design,I suggested to introduce differential taxation to different industries;to gradually raise tax rate and regulate it dynamically;to further expand the scope of collection;to further detail preferential policy;and to use revenue as ear-marked.On taxation management,I suggested to perfect the collaboration mechanism and build information exchange platform between two administrations of environmental protection and taxation;to improve enterprises’consciousness of tax payment through intensive publicity;to bring the index of payment of environmental protection tax into enterprise credit system;to classify key-monitoring and non-key-monitoring tax payers according to indexes of pollution discharge,and implement classified management;to cultivate professionals in taxation administration;and to give full play to third-party institutions of environmental protection and monitoring.Besides,on specific course of collection,I suggested to manage tax declaration by law;to enrich and perfect methods of verification collection;to explore to establish the risk-response index system of environmental protection tax;to make better use of review procedure to improve management of environmental protection tax;to strengthen cross-departmental collaboration to promote tax collection;and to quantize management of the fund of environmental protection tax revenue.