Research On Legal Issues Of Digital Service Tax

In recent years,the digitalization of the economy has led to a value mismatch between the place of value creation and the place of profit attribution for multinational enterprises,i.e.the phenomenon of not having a permanent establishment entity in the market country,but still being able to profit from the value generated by the user’s participation and not having to pay taxes to the user’s country.The problem of international tax avoidance by multinational enterprises has made the user’s country aware of the legal loopholes in tax rules,but filling the loopholes by means of additional income tax would be restricted by tax treaties,and the user’s country cannot exercise tax jurisdiction over the value created by its own user participation under the existing international tax rules due to the permanent establishment principle.Therefore,in order to protect their tax interests in the digital economy,countries have launched a wide range of practices at the international level to reform their tax systems,and the digital service tax has emerged as a temporary measure.At this stage,some countries in the world have certain theoretical research basis for digital service tax system and have already started to implement digital service tax,but due to the great differences in national conditions and different needs of economic interests represented by each country,the legislation of digital service tax also differs greatly from country to country,and it is more difficult to form uniform tax rules at the international level.While the digital economy brings economic benefits to the global economy,it also causes confusion in the application of international tax rules,and it is difficult to form new tax rules to the satisfaction of each country in a short period of time.Chinese scholars have also begun to realize the tax challenges brought by the development of digital economy and consider the possibility of legislating digital service tax in China according to the economic development of China.At present,the research on the construction of the legal system of digital service tax in China is not sufficient,and the number of research results is relatively small compared with foreign countries,and it is still in the budding and developing stage.Although there is not much demand for digital service tax legislation in China at this stage,we can draw on the experience of the legislative practice of digital service tax to improve our tax legal system.Therefore,the digital service tax has greater research value in China.This paper takes digital service tax as the research object,firstly,analyzes digital service tax from the perspective of theoretical research,mainly including its background,connotation and theoretical basis,and the reasons for the divergent opinions on digital service tax legislation,etc.;secondly,introduces the international legislative practice of digital service tax,including the legislative practice of digital service tax in the world’s major countries and the plans or programs of relevant international organizations on digital service tax,etc.,and conducts a study on the above practice.Once again,the legal controversies of digital service tax legislation are summarized,and the problems can be categorized into three aspects:legality,legitimacy and fairness,and after analysis,it is believed that the tax base has legality in form and content,and the exercise of jurisdiction has legitimacy and is in line with the principle of fairness,so digital service tax does not have the problem of insufficient legality;Finally,on the basis of pointing out the problems of China’s tax legal system at the present stage,it analyzes the necessity of improving China’s digital economy tax legal system,and proposes measures to construct China’s digital economy tax legal system by drawing on the legislative experience of digital service tax.The innovation of this paper is to analyze the legal controversies of digital service tax in depth from the perspective of legal issue research by conducting theoretical and practical research on digital service tax,to propose ideas for solving the problem of insufficient legality of digital service tax,and then,after analyzing the problems of China’s taxation system,to provide new ideas for the taxation legal system of digital economy in line with China’s national conditions by drawing on the legislative experience of digital service tax.