Tax forensics, which sounds like the "Sherlock Holmes" of the tax world, is actually a rigorous and specialized field. It involves tax experts examining, identifying and judging tax issues in court proceedings and providing authoritative appraisal opinions. An objective, fair and scientific judicial appraisal report is like a key to solving tax disputes, which is very important for safeguarding the fairness and justice of criminal law, tax law and the legitimate rights and interests of the parties concerned.

In March this year, the Supreme Court and the Supreme Prosecutor jointly issued the Interpretation of Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in Handling Criminal Cases of Endangering Tax Collection and Administration (Legal Interpretation [2024] No. 4, hereinafter referred to as the Interpretation). The following month, the Supreme Court, the Supreme Prosecutor of the relevant judges, prosecutors were written on the Interpretation of the understanding and application of the Interpretation of which the distinction between the crime of false VAT invoicing and the crime of illegal sale of VAT invoices triggered a controversy, but also affects the direction of the practical decision, a number of cases were re-sentenced to the crime of illegal sale of VAT invoices. I learned that, following the case of Zhejiang Shen's Provincial Logistics, the case of false VAT invoicing of a network freight platform in Sichuan was also settled, and the Offense of false VAT invoicing was re-sentenced to the Offense of illegal sale of VAT invoices, and the two main culprits were sentenced to more than ten years. This article takes this as an entry point to discuss whether it is appropriate to re-sentence this kind of case for platform enterprises and analyze how the “activation” of the crime of illegal sale of VAT invoices will affect the development of platform enterprises in practice.

At present, the capacity indicator has become a necessary condition for steel enterprises to carry out construction projects, and China's capacity replacement activities are more active. Recently, the author received a steel production enterprise consulting, the local tax authorities believe that the enterprise in 2019 to retreat from the city relocation in the capacity replacement should be regarded as sales, requiring the enterprise to make up for the value-added tax, urban construction tax, education surcharges, local education surcharges and enterprise income tax totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. In the author's view, the steel production capacity indicator belongs to the administrative license qualification or intangible asset is controversial, whether the capacity replacement activity belongs to the scope of value-added tax and enterprise income tax also needs to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. Taxation should be in line with the principle of substantive taxation and the principle of tax law, and the taxability of the act of production capacity removal should be judged on the basis of accurately grasping the legal nature of the iron and steel production capacity indexes and the nature of the production capacity replacement activities, and combining with the various elements of the tax entities stipulated in the tax law.

In the past, many high net worth individuals (HNWIs) have built partnership shareholding platforms in tax depressions in order to enjoy tax incentives such as approved levies and fiscal refunds to realize tax savings. However, with the Notice on Administration of Collection of Individual Income Tax on Income from Equity Investments (Notice No. 41 of the Ministry of Finance and the State Administration of Taxation of 2021) coming into effect, coupled with the strict investigation of illegal financial rebates in recent years, the original tax advantages of partnership-type shareholding platforms have gradually disappeared, and HNWIs have chosen to dismantle their shareholding platforms and return to the original state of direct shareholding. The dismantling of the shareholding platform will also generate a high tax burden, what kind of dismantling can HNWIs choose to realize the optimal tax saving effect? This article is intended to discuss.

The two high tax-related judicial interpretations make it clear that the crime of false invoicing is not punishable if the purpose is not to fraudulently offset the tax, and if there is no fraudulent loss of tax due to offsetting. At the same time, the interpretation of the Supreme Law pointed out that the behavior of invoicing party charging “invoicing fee” and “tax point” and then invoicing others is essentially selling VAT invoices as commodities, and it is an illegal sale of VAT invoices. Influenced by this, the cases involving platform enterprises are basically characterized according to the crime of illegally selling VAT invoices. According to the main data of judicial trial work in the first half of this year published by the Supreme Court, the number of cases received in the first instance for the crime of illegal sale of VAT invoices increased by 190% year-on-year, which also reflects a significant shift in the judicial thinking of handling cases involving invoices. This article intends to combine a real case to analyze how the enterprises involved in the case should break the situation.

Among the types of offences for which administrative penalties are imposed through tax inspection procedures, tax evasion accounts for a high proportion, has heavy consequences and is controversial, and various factors make the determination of tax evasion a hot tax issue that has attracted much attention. For the understanding of some tax laws and regulations, tax enterprises often have deviations, imperfections in tax laws, the emergence of new business models, etc., which will inevitably cause disputes between tax enterprises. Such as the ‘Tax Administration Law,’ Article 63, ‘does not list less income’ behaviour, such as taxpayers due to disputes over the understanding of tax policy and law, can a blanket qualification for tax evasion? Based on a case of tax evasion penalty being revoked, this paper discusses the constitutive elements of tax evasion, the burden of proof, the standard of proof and other issues, and points out that cases in which there are cognitive differences between the two sides of tax enterprises on a tax-related matter should not be unilaterally qualified as tax evasion, which can make the determination of tax evasion and the penalty more in line with the requirements of the principle of equal responsibility and punishment.

Guarantee is a common means of credit enhancement in civil and commercial legal relations, which has the functions of reducing transaction risks and guaranteeing the realization of claims, and is of great significance to the financing of enterprises. In the field of tax administration, the role of tax guarantee should not be ignored, especially in the tax disputes that need to pay tax before starting the reconsideration procedure, the tax guarantee can be used as the “equalizer” for the payment of tax and late payment fee to protect the legitimate rights and interests of taxpayers while safeguarding the collection of national tax. The Trial Measures on Tax Guarantee have made relatively systematic provisions on tax guarantee, but it has not been revised since its promulgation in 2005, and it has not responded to the disputes such as the scope of collaterals and the period of confirmation of guarantee, etc., which existed in practice, and there exists a certain degree of lagging, and due to the requirement of the pre-positioning of tax payment for reconsideration, based on the justiciable nature of the tax guarantee, some of the disputed cases have undergone litigations on the establishment or otherwise of the tax guarantee before the filing of the rights and remedies. The tax guarantee is established or not, the formation of the “case within a case”. In this paper, two common disputes related to the confirmation of tax guarantee are discussed to analyze how enterprises can effectively complete the requirement of tax payment prior to tax payment through tax guarantee and successfully initiate relief procedures.

Split-accounting system is favored by the booming platform enterprises in the Internet era because of its convenient settlement, fund security and high flexibility. However, in practice, some platform enterprises lack compliance awareness, and the invoicing or fund settlement method is unreasonable, which easily puts them into tax risk. In this article, the author will combine two cases in which platform enterprises were required by tax authorities to bear the full amount of VAT tax obligations for all the money received, analyze the tax risks under the split account mode of platform enterprises, and give the defense ideas and compliance suggestions to help platform enterprises to prevent and resolve tax risks.