As an important part of the real estate tax system, the liquidation and recovery of land value-added tax often lead to disputes between tax authorities and enterprises due to the application of rules. This article takes a final case of land value-added tax liquidation dispute of a real estate development enterprise ruled by Tianjin Higher People's Court (2024) Jin Xing Zhong No. 32 as the starting point, focusing on three core controversial issues: the determination of the submission of liquidation materials, the definition of the nature of taxes, and the starting point of the tax recovery period. Combined with local tax administration rules and basic principles of tax law, it conducts an analysis to provide a reference for clarifying the adjudication logic of similar cases.

Editor's Note: Recently, the State Taxation Administration Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Tax Bureau issued the Announcement on Clarifying Issues Related to Land Value-Added Tax (2025 No. 2), which clearly stipulates core issues such as the land value-added tax liquidation unit, the time for collecting revenue and costs, and the method for allocating costs and expenses, responding to many disputes in practice. Previously, Xinjiang implemented the Announcement on Clarifying Issues Related to Land Value-Added Tax (2016 No. 6). The new regulation comes nine years after the old one, and the changes deserve close attention from real estate development enterprises. Combining with the practice of land value-added tax collection and management, the author selects seven key points in the new regulation for interpretation, for readers' reference.

Editor's Note: In December 2018, the Ministry of Natural Resources issued the Letter on Policies Concerning the Compensated Recovery of Idle Land Due to Government Reasons through Agreement (Ziranzi Banhan [2018] No. 1903), which clarifies that when grassroots governments, in accordance with the Measures for the Disposal of Idle Land, investigate and confirm that land is idle due to government reasons and decide to recover it with compensation, they shall follow the principles of consensus through consultation and reasonable compensation, and require that the compensation amount be determined by both parties through joint consultation with reference to market prices. Since then, the compensation standards for the recovery of idle land due to government reasons nationwide have no longer been limited to the land bidding costs but generally follow market premium compensation. This raises a tax administration issue: whether the land compensation received when land, idle due to government reasons, is recovered by the land reserve center at market prices can be exempt from Land Value Increment Tax. This article analyzes this issue.

Recently, an enterprise was required by the tax authorities to pay back the tax and pay the corresponding late payment fee due to the non-payment of land use tax for the construction of farms in the administrative villages under the jurisdiction of the established towns, which involves a huge amount of money. It is understood that this kind of controversial case occurs all over the country, and the regulations on whether the scope of land use tax of formed towns includes administrative villages are not the same in different places. In this paper, we would like to briefly analyze the scope of land use tax in relation to this case for the reference of enterprises.

Although land use tax is a small tax, its tax compliance cannot be ignored. In practice, there are few cases in which enterprises did not actually use the land after being granted the land for various reasons, which triggered disputes between the tax authorities and enterprises. Recently, a real estate enterprise has not paid the land use tax because the land is idle due to government reasons, and the tax authorities require it to pay the tax and the corresponding late payment fee, which involves a huge amount of tax. This article is intended to start from the case, the tax enterprise dispute points to make a brief analysis, for the reference of enterprises in similar cases.

On October 25, the Ministry of Finance released the fiscal revenue and expenditure situation in the first three quarters of 2024, and the statistics show that the national tax revenue from January to September decreased by 5.3% year-on-year, and the property tax among the land and real estate-related taxes was 311.8 billion yuan, an increase of 19.9% year-on-year, and the land value-added tax (VAT) was 400 billion yuan, a decrease of 7.8% year-on-year. VAT, land value-added tax and other transaction-related taxes and fees are hotspots of long-term concern for the real estate industry, and in the context of significant changes in the supply and demand relationship in the housing market at present, enterprises should also focus on property tax, urban land use tax and other taxes and fees in the real estate holding segment. Recently, a listed company in Inner Mongolia announced that its subsidiaries conducted self-inspection and verification of property tax returns according to the requirements of the local tax bureau, and due to the inconsistent understanding of the tax basis, the subsidiaries were required to make up for a total of 111,059,700 yuan of property tax and late payment fees from December 2018 to June 2024, which was expected to affect the net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company for the year 2024 of approximately 80.69 million yuan. Based on the main controversial issues of property tax in practice, this article selects three typical cases to analyze the application and understanding of policies and other issues by cases for readers' reference.

On July 24, 2023, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China held a meeting to analyze and study the current economic situation, pointing out that at present, the supply and demand relationship in China's real estate market has undergone significant changes. Against the background of the impeded operation of the real estate market and the continued downturn in real estate development investment, real estate development enterprises are facing different degrees of capital pressure. At present, housing prices around the world continued to decline, property transactions plummeted, real estate development enterprises sales revenue is far lower than expected at the beginning of the project development, the project profit shrinks significantly. In the past, many real estate development enterprises acquired land use rights in the form of transferring the equity of the project company through open share field transactions, in which the transferor did not pay the land value-added tax, and the subsequent project company needed to bear a huge amount of land value-added tax due to the extremely low land price paid for the land use rights in real estate liquidation. When the real estate price was high, the project company was still able to bear the cost of real estate development including the tax burden. Now that the real estate market is in the doldrums and the profitability of the project has been greatly reduced, the real estate development company may face the risk of not being able to pay the huge amount of land value-added tax. At the same time, according to the previous tax collection and management practice, the transferor of the land use right in the field of explicit shares is also facing the risk of being penetrated to collect land value-added tax or even characterized as tax evasion. In addition, the legal risks faced by the transferring parties are also more complicated due to the different operations of enterprises in the process of land acquisition, establishment of project companies and equity transfer. Based on this, this paper analyzes the tax risks of the equity transferor and transferee in the field transaction of explicit shares based on the current situation of real estate market for readers' reference.

Editor's Note: In recent years, with the acceleration of urban renewal, infrastructure construction has witnessed constant innovation in various regions. However, in the planning of infrastructure projects, the occupation of corporate land is often involved, leading to frequent situations of land requisition and acquisition. After receiving compensation from the government, companies usually enjoy preferential policies in value-added tax (VAT), but there are often disputes between enterprises and tax authorities in terms of the application of tax exemption. This article takes the example of approval document disputes over tax exemption to delve into the relevant procedures and applicable conditions for tax exemption during land requisition process, and provide practical suggestions for relevant enterprises.