1. Taxable cost
Refers to all kinds of expenses paid by the government to obtain taxes, including direct costs and indirect costs.
(1) Direct cost refers to the tax design cost of the tax department (including the design and publicity of tax laws and related policies, etc.). ), the cost of tax collection and the investigation cost of carrying out tax inspection and handling illegal cases.
(2) Indirect costs refer to the expenses borne by relevant social departments, groups and organizations for the government to organize taxes.
2. Tax cost
Refers to the cost paid by taxpayers to fulfill their tax obligations. Tax costs mainly include the following aspects:
(1) Conduct tax registration, set up account books, record and calculate income and cost expenditures according to the requirements of the tax law;
(2) the time, energy and money spent on hiring accountants or tax consultants to file tax returns;
(3) the manpower, material resources, financial resources, time and energy spent in paying taxes;
(4) Tax planning for reasonable tax avoidance and expenses incurred in tax disputes.
(5) Learning costs arising from understanding the tax system. Generally speaking, the cost of paying taxes is much higher than that of the government.
3. The influence of class tax burden
It mainly means that government taxation will inevitably distort economic operation and taxpayers' decision-making, thus causing additional economic losses exceeding government tax revenue. For example, the production-oriented value-added tax currently implemented in China stipulates that the fixed assets investment of enterprises cannot be deducted from the input tax, so enterprises will bear different tax burdens due to different organic composition of capital and different proportions of material input and labor input, thus distorting the allocation of resources and hindering the technological progress and industrial upgrading of enterprises.
Second, modern tax theory generally summarizes tax efficiency into three aspects:
(1) From the perspective of resource allocation, tax allocation is conducive to the effective allocation of resources, so that society can get the maximum benefit from available resources.
(2) From the perspective of economic operation, tax distribution should be conducive to economic operation, and promote the steady growth of the national economy and the improvement of microeconomic benefits. Government taxation is a process of transferring the resources occupied and used by private economic sectors to government departments. If the tax distribution is improper, it will distort the market economy, affect the correct decision-making of producers and consumers, bring welfare losses to society, and form the so-called tax overload. Therefore, taxation should follow the principle of efficiency, minimize the excessive burden borne by society, and form a smaller tax cost in exchange for a larger income (that is, efficiency).
(3) From the perspective of tax management, the proportion of taxpayers' expenditure to income should be as small as possible.