Against the background of the extreme imbalance between China's energy reserves and energy consumption structure, coal-to-oil technology is of great significance in reversing China's abnormally high degree of external dependence on oil and gas resources, promoting the efficient and clean utilization of resources, and guaranteeing national energy security. However, as the end products of coal-to-oil technology are refined oils such as gasoline and diesel, although the current tax law does not include coal-based liquid products in the consumption tax items, the 2022 National Special Rectification Action for the Refined Oil Industry will also include the projects of coal indirect liquefaction process technology in the scope of verification, resulting in the coal-based stabilized light hydrocarbons as an intermediate product is also faced with the risk of excise tax audits.

Since the revision of the Provisional Regulations on Consumption Tax in 2008, the scope of consumption tax levy and exemption for chemical products produced with crude oil and coal as raw materials has been controversial.After the online launch of the refined oil invoice module in 2018, the state has continued to strengthen the collection and management of consumption tax on the whole chain of the petrochemical industry. In particular, since August last year, the issue of levying consumption tax on chemical products such as crude oil products and coal-based oils as naphtha has been more prominent in Shaanxi, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, which has had a huge impact on the chemical industry in these places.

Off-the-books operation is the most common form of tax evasion by gas stations. According to the provisions of the Tax Collection and Administration Law, off-the-books operation meets the constitutive elements of tax evasion, in which the determination of the amount of tax evasion is not only a measure of administrative violation of taxpayers, but also the key to accurately determine whether the tax evasion reaches the standard of criminal filing as well as to determine the range of the statutory penalties, which has a significant impact on the rights and interests of the taxpayers and therefore there are a lot of disputes in the judiciary and the law enforcement practice. In this paper, we are going to analyze the determination of tax evasion amount by combining with real cases in the field of gas stations, and comprehensively reveal the tax-related risks of off-the-books operation and methods to deal with them.

Recently, the Criminal Investigation Brigade of Naiman Banner Public Security Bureau of Tongliao City, Inner Mongolia, successfully cracked a large-scale case of false VAT invoicing supervised by the Ministry of Public Security, in which the enterprise involved in the case, through fictitious transactions, changed the name of the raw material oil, crude white oil, and other chemical raw material input tickets into transportation tickets and then falsely invoiced them outward, with a total amount of 113 million yuan (prior to the introduction of Circular No. 11 in 2023) involved in the case. This article intends to analyze the tax risks of each transaction subject in different purchase and sale modes by combining the different modes of oil invoices renamed as transportation invoices, and put forward the defense and compliance points of enterprises according to the focus of the investigation and handling of the case.

Editor's note: Recently, another transportation company has been dealt with and punished for falsely accepting refined oil invoices and issuing false transportation invoices, and the flow of oil stamps into the transportation field has a high tax risk. Based on this case, this article intends to summarize the common problems of the frequent occurrence of false opening risks of transportation enterprises in recent years, and explain the tax-related risks and defense space of the enterprises involved in the case and their upstream and downstream.