(A) the impact of e-commerce on tax principles

Tax principle is the basic basis for formulating relevant tax policies and the basic standard for measuring their rationality. Judging from the requirements of the principle of fairness in tax burden, e-commerce is against the principle of fairness. Because with the development of e-commerce, this "virtual" trade form, which is completely different from the traditional visible trade based on the Internet, is often not covered by the existing tax system. The fluidity, concealment and digitalization of e-commerce itself are not compatible with the ability of tax authorities to obtain information and the level of tax collection and management, which makes it an "excellent" international tax haven and leads to unfair tax burden between traditional trade subjects and e-commerce subjects.

The second principle of tax system design is that the tax process must be efficient. The administrative expenses collected should not be extravagant and wasteful, and the subordinate expenses of taxpayers should not be unnecessarily increased. In addition, the extra tax burden should be minimized. However, the development of e-commerce will have a certain impact on the principle of tax efficiency. For example, in e-commerce transactions, providers of products or services can directly omit middlemen (such as agents, wholesalers, retailers, etc.). ) and provide products directly to consumers. Due to the disappearance of intermediary agencies, tax collection and management will become complicated. Originally, we could get huge tax from a few agents, but now many inexperienced taxpayers have joined e-commerce, which will increase the workload of tax authorities and raise the tax cost.

(B) In the e-commerce environment, some basic concepts and norms of international taxation have been challenged and impacted.

1. The concept of permanent establishment is questioned.

A permanent establishment is a fixed business place where an enterprise conducts all or part of its business activities. Traditional taxation is to determine the source of business income with a permanent establishment, that is, a fixed business place where an enterprise conducts all or part of its business activities. However, e-commerce enables non-residents to realize sales activities through websites located on servers in source countries. Do non-residents have a permanent establishment at this time? If the website is not used to promote products or services, can it be recognized as a non-permanent institution and get tax-free treatment?

In addition to the above problems, disputes about permanent institutions caused by e-commerce also involve special disputes about agents. Regarding the determination of permanent establishment, the OECD Model Convention holds that if a non-resident uses an agent to engage in activities in a country, and the agent (whether independent or not) has the right to sign contracts and accept orders on behalf of the non-resident, it can be determined that the non-resident has a permanent establishment in that country. In the face of e-commerce, most countries hope that Internet service providers meet the definition of independent agents, so they can be regarded as permanent institutions exercising tax jurisdiction. But in fact, even if all the contracts are signed through the infrastructure negotiation of the network service provider, it is not enough to regard the network service provider as an agent. Under the current concept system, because most international tax treaties refer to non-independent people as people, it is not in line with the current concept to regard network service providers as agents.

2. It is easy to fall into the conflict of international tax jurisdiction.

Tax jurisdiction is the basic category of international taxation. How to choose and establish tax jurisdiction is the most important issue in international taxation, and it is also the core issue in the construction of foreign-related taxation. As far as the current situation is concerned, most countries in the world have parallel source tax jurisdiction and resident (citizen) tax jurisdiction, that is, they tax the global income of their own residents (citizens) and the income of residents (citizens) from other countries respectively. The resulting international double taxation is usually exempted through bilateral tax agreements. However, in Internet trade, both tax jurisdictions are facing severe challenges.

First of all, the development of Internet trade will weaken the jurisdiction of tax sources. When foreign enterprises use the Internet to conduct trade activities in a country, they often only need an intelligent server with pre-approved software to buy and sell digital products. It is difficult to classify and count the business behavior of servers, and it is difficult to identify who buys and sells goods. In addition, the emergence of the Internet makes services break through geographical restrictions, and service providers can be thousands of miles away. As a result, the emergence of e-commerce has caused disputes about the judgment of income sources in various countries.

Secondly, the tax jurisdiction of residents (citizens) has also been seriously impacted. At present, management centers or control centers generally judge the identity of corporate residents in various countries. However, with the emergence of e-commerce, the integration of international trade and the wide application of various advanced technical means, some unimaginable situations will become possible. For example, the management control center of an enterprise may exist in many countries or not in any country. In this case, it will be difficult for tax authorities to levy income tax on enterprises according to the principle of personality, and the tax jurisdiction of residents also appears to be ineffective.

3. The boundaries between some commodities, services and preferential treatment become blurred, which leads to confusion in tax treatment.

Distinguishing between commodity income, labor income and franchise income is particularly important for correctly handling international tax issues. In e-commerce, many products or services are converted in digital form and through electronic transmission, and digital information can be easily copied or downloaded. Therefore, it blurs the boundary between tangible goods, intangible services and concessions, making it difficult for the relevant tax authorities to confirm whether an income comes from the sale of goods, the provision of services or royalties, which will lead to confusion in tax treatment, and it is likely that they do not know which taxes it applies to. For example, if a bookstore sells 1 000 books within1month, the tax authorities can levy value-added tax on the sales of 1000 books. Now, if the bookstore is moved to the Internet and readers download relevant books through the Internet, then we can regard it as tangible commodity sales and levy value-added tax, or we can regard it as intangible franchise transfer and levy income tax. However, the tax authorities cannot determine how many books or bytes of electronic information this online bookstore sold in 1 month.

4. The problem of international tax avoidance caused by transfer pricing is more prominent. Under the traditional trading mode, it is not uncommon to use transfer pricing to avoid tax burden. Tax authorities can adjust the prices and profits of unconventional transactions by using the methods of comparable profits, cost increase, profit division and resale price. E-commerce has fundamentally changed the way enterprises conduct business activities. Business activities that were originally carried out by people now rely more on software and machines, which further strengthens the mobility of business. Multinational companies can use their sites in tax-free countries or low-tax countries to easily transfer "services" and achieve the purpose of tax avoidance. In addition, in order to reduce costs, some multinational enterprise groups are increasingly applying EDI (Electronic Data Management) technology, which makes enterprise groups highly integrated, thus causing more tax problems in transfer pricing, leading to more intense international tax avoidance and anti-tax avoidance struggles.

(C) It is difficult to obtain real tax collection and management information under the e-commerce environment, which brings difficulties to tax collection and management.

According to the viewpoint of game theory, the relationship between tax authorities and taxpayers is always a game. The asymmetry of information makes it difficult for tax authorities to determine the subject, object, link and place of tax payment. Therefore, it is the core of tax collection and management for tax authorities to fully grasp the taxpayer's information. E-commerce is an invisible trading activity in the virtual market. Its paperless operation and the mobility of trading participants make the information asymmetry between tax authorities and taxpayers particularly prominent in tax collection and management.

1. It is difficult to obtain taxpayer identity information.

Determining the taxpayer is the premise of taxation. There are two basic ways to confirm the customer's identity online, one is "tracking the supply route" and the other is tracking the source of payment. When tracking the supply route, you can find out the computer address of the supply destination through the computer. However, because the computer address used by enterprises is not standardized, it is not enough to confirm the destination country of supply by only one computer address. In addition, the buyer can also provide anonymous e-mail service through the Internet, thus deliberately concealing his identity. People even invented the "smoke screen method". In this way, multiple computers are inserted in the middle, and even the shipper does not know the real computer address of the customer. It can be seen that it is difficult to confirm the identity of customers by tracing the "supply path" because of the computer address. In tracing the source of loans, accounting on the Internet in the future will be based on credit cards and electronic money. At present, some checkout work is still carried out by credit card number. Due to the international recognition of credit cards, the nationality of cardholders can be found out. However, large credit card organizations will implement the SETP (Secure Electronic Transaction Proto-Col) standard in the future, which will not disclose the identity of the buyer and credit card information to the seller. The use of electronic cash should also attract full attention. At present, there is no uniform standard for electronic cash, and its auditability is inconsistent. In many cases, the payer is anonymous, which greatly increases the difficulty of obtaining information and makes it possible to evade taxes by using electronic cash. So technically, it is difficult to find out the identity of the buyer or the information of the destination country of the supply, whether it is tracking the supply process or the payment process.

2. It is difficult to obtain the information of tax objects.

Even if the taxpayer is determined, it is still difficult to determine what transactions the taxpayer has made, that is, how to obtain transaction information in e-commerce tax collection and management. For example, accounting records are the basic evidence of company transactions and an effective way to obtain tax collection and management. In order to confirm the income and expenses declared by taxpayers, taxpayers are required to keep accurate accounting records for inspection by tax authorities. Traditionally, these records need to be kept in writing. However, taxpayers who sell and serve electronic goods in e-commerce may not make such written records and conduct transactions electronically. These transaction records can only be in electronic form, and such electronic records can be easily changed.

3. Cross-border transactions on the Internet increase the difficulty of obtaining tax collection and management information.

One of the most potential areas of the Internet is cross-border transactions. Any cross-border trader will expect to reduce his own costs to the same extent as domestic transactions, and financial services are a necessary condition to meet his wishes. In order to stimulate the development of online transactions, the Internet has begun to provide complete "tax protection" for some online banks set up in duty-free zones. At present, domestic banks are the most important source of information for tax authorities, and tax authorities can obtain relevant information of taxpayers by querying bank accounts to judge whether their declarations are true or not. Even if the tax authorities do not regularly check the taxpayer's bank account, potential tax evaders will be aware of the risks of tax evasion. In this way, it objectively provides a supervision mechanism for tax collection, and also has a deterrent effect on potential tax evaders. However, if the information source becomes an online bank located in other countries, this supervision and restriction mechanism will be greatly reduced, and tax evasion is likely to become a reality.

(D) The distribution of tax benefits caused by e-commerce among different countries can not be ignored.

Because e-commerce has different effects on tax revenue in different countries, tax preferences in different countries must also be adjusted. Some countries are big countries in information technology, and will inevitably use their own technological advantages to harm the interests of other countries. For example, in the Outline of Global Electronic Commerce, US President Bill Clinton announced that the Internet should be a tax-free zone, and all products and services transmitted through the Internet should be tax-free. As the United States is a big exporter of information, its ideas are of course beneficial to itself and opposed by other countries. All these will inevitably bring about new international tax conflicts and new international tax cooperation to solve these conflicts.

Different international organizations also have different biases towards the above two principles. For example, treaties made by OECD are often based on the principle of residence, while treaties made by the United Nations are often based on the principle of tax source. The development of e-commerce needs the mixture of these two principles in order to establish a fair and reasonable global tax system and lay the foundation for international tax cooperation. This is also the need for the same manufacturer to avoid double taxation in global e-commerce activities. How to establish a fairer tax distribution system for e-commerce in favor of developing countries still needs to be strived for in international negotiations and cooperation.

Two, learn from international experience, improve the e-commerce tax policy

(A) to clarify the tax principles of China in the e-commerce environment.

1. Tax neutrality principle

Taxation is a way of distribution and a way of resource allocation. National taxation is the transfer of social resources from taxpayers to government departments. In this transfer process, it will not only cause taxpayers a burden equivalent to paying taxes, but also cause an excessive burden to taxpayers or society. The so-called overburdening is mainly manifested in two aspects: first, the state tax revenue increases the expenditure of government departments while reducing the expenditure of taxpayers. If the loss of tax on taxpayers' economic interests is greater than the increase of tax on social and economic interests, it will happen in resource allocation; Second, because tax has changed the relative price of goods, it has a negative impact on taxpayers' consumption behavior and production behavior, which occurs when the economic operation burden is too heavy. Tax neutrality is put forward in view of the heavy tax burden. According to tax theory, excessive tax burden will reduce tax efficiency, and the important way to reduce excessive tax burden and improve tax efficiency is to maintain the principle of tax neutrality as much as possible. From this, it can be judged that tax neutrality contains two basic meanings: first, the cost paid by the state tax to the society is limited to tax, and it will not bring other additional losses or burdens to taxpayers or society as much as possible; Second, national taxation should avoid interfering with the normal operation of the market economy, especially not making taxation a decisive factor in resource allocation outside the market mechanism.

From this perspective, the practical significance of the principle of tax neutrality lies in that the implementation of taxation should not delay or hinder the development of network economy (e-commerce). From the aspects of promoting technological progress and reducing transaction costs, e-commerce has great advantages over traditional transaction methods and represents the future transaction methods, so it should be supported, at least new taxes should not be levied on it. In addition, from the reality of e-commerce development in China, China's computer ownership rate and Internet access rate are lower in the world according to the average population, and the information industry is still in its infancy, with few website resources, which basically belongs to an infant industry and needs the strong support of the government. Therefore, in terms of tax policy, we should give preferential policies in the early stage of e-commerce development, and then consider taxation when conditions are ripe, and adjust the tax rate with the development of e-commerce and the level of industrial profit rate, so as to adjust tax revenue.

As far as the world is concerned, following the principle of tax neutrality has become the basic common sense of e-commerce taxation. 1996165438+10, the U.S. treasury department published the report "global selective tax policy for e-commerce", arguing that tax neutrality should guide the basic principles of e-commerce taxation, and the existing taxes should be modified to make them applicable to e-commerce to ensure that the development of e-commerce will not distort the fairness of tax collection. 1In April 1997, Council of Europe also published the report "Facing E-commerce: the Preferred Tax Scheme in Europe", which accepted the view of the United States that we should try our best to adapt the existing taxes, especially the value-added tax, to the development of e-commerce, instead of levying new taxes.

2. The principle of fiscal revenue

The establishment and development of e-commerce tax system must also follow the principle of fiscal revenue and coordinate with the overall national tax system to ensure the needs of national expenditure. The principle of fiscal revenue has two requirements: the first requirement is that the tax revenue composed of e-commerce and other industries can fully meet the needs of public expenditure in a certain period; The second requirement is that e-commerce tax should be flexible, and the tax elasticity should be greater than or equal to 1, so as to ensure the synchronous growth of fiscal revenue and national income. The establishment and development of electronic tax system must follow the principle of fiscal revenue, coordinate with the overall national tax system, and ensure the needs of national expenditure. As far as e-commerce is concerned, the principle of fiscal revenue has two requirements: the first requirement is that the tax revenue formed by e-commerce and other industries can fully meet the needs of public expenditure in a certain period; The second requirement is that e-commerce tax should be flexible, and the tax elasticity should be greater than or equal to 1, so as to ensure the synchronous growth of fiscal revenue and national income.

3. Make full use of the existing tax provisions.

In its Treasury documents, the United States believes that there is no essential difference between e-commerce and traditional trading methods. In order to avoid distorting economic activities, tax neutrality should be the most important tax principle of e-commerce. The EU Council of Ministers basically holds the same view. Regarding the principle of neutrality, the US Treasury document further points out that it is the best way to form an international knowledge by using the existing tax principles to form rules for taxing e-commerce. At the OECD Roundtable19971KLOC-0/held in Finland in June, the participants unanimously recognized the principle of tax neutrality and the principle of using existing taxes. In June, 2000, Professor Rosen of Princeton University, a former assistant to the US Treasury Secretary, also stressed that the development of network economy does not necessarily need to fundamentally reform the existing fiscal and taxation policies, but should adapt the network economy to the existing fiscal and taxation policies as much as possible. These opinions of foreign economists and international organizations may reflect the development trend of e-commerce tax policy to a certain extent, which has practical guiding significance for China to formulate e-commerce tax policy, that is, e-commerce tax should make use of existing tax laws and regulations as much as possible. For example, China Hong Kong Taxation Bureau has not issued a special e-commerce tax law, but only requires taxpayers to add a special e-commerce column in the annual tax return, requiring enterprises to declare e-commerce information.

4. Adhere to the principle of national tax sovereignty.

At present, China is still in the ranks of developing countries, and its economy and technology will be relatively backward for some time. In the field of e-commerce, this means that China will be a net importer for a long time. Therefore, the development of e-commerce in China can't copy the model of developed countries, step by step. Instead, we should learn from the successful experience of other countries' e-commerce development and explore an e-commerce development model suitable for China's national conditions. When formulating the tax plan for online commerce, we should not only be in line with international standards, but also consider safeguarding national sovereignty and protecting national interests. For example, for foreign companies engaged in online sales in China, they should be required to register in China, and the money that China consumers buy their products or services will be remitted to their accounts in China, and on this basis, their sales value-added tax will be levied. For another example, in order to strengthen tax supervision, we can consider mandatory tax link, customs link and bank link to the servers of every domestic and foreign company engaged in online sales, so as to ensure real-time and effective monitoring of online sales and ensure the collection of national taxes.

(B) the principle of permanent establishment in the e-commerce environment adaptability

First of all, we should admit that the emergence of e-commerce has brought revolutionary changes to the traditional business model, and the concept of tax treaty based on the traditional business model has also been correspondingly impacted. The permanent organization of the OECD model agreement is the standard for judging the taxation of transnational business profits. Article 5 of the Agreement defines a permanent establishment as: "Permanent establishment" refers to "a fixed business place where an enterprise carries out all or part of its business". This definition contains three basic elements: (1) place; (2) fixing; (3) conducting business. Abstract these three elements are tangible in space, relatively long in time and substantial in economic activities. Traditional commerce is conducted in the traditional physical space, while e-commerce is not. It creates a completely different space-time environment-electronic space. Physical space is tangible, with distance and national boundaries; Electronic space is virtual, distance is no longer important, and national boundaries have been broken. It is precisely because of the physical characteristics of the traditional space on which traditional commerce depends that the permanent establishment becomes an easy-to-determine and highly operational standard. In e-commerce, tangible shops and offices are gone, replaced by virtual shops and virtual offices. Then, under this condition, does the concept or criterion of permanent establishment still apply to e-commerce? As we all know, if an enterprise wants to develop e-commerce, it must first establish its own website. The website is composed of software and a lot of information, which is intangible, so the website itself cannot constitute a permanent institution. But the physical support of the website is the server, which is hardware and tangible, and it has the physical conditions to form a permanent institution. If the website is not stored on the server, it is just an empty shell and has no intelligence, so it can't carry out any business activities, so it can't form a permanent institution. Traditional business usually requires people to participate in business activities. With the progress of science and technology, automatic machines can run without manual intervention or remote control. Paragraph 10 of the fifth note of the OECD Model Convention has recognized that automatic machines can form a permanent institution, so human participation is no longer a necessary condition for forming a permanent institution. In this way, the server that stores the website is the business place, and if it is not replaced frequently, it constitutes a "fixed business place". Therefore, if an enterprise owns a website/server and engages in activities related to its core business work through the website/server instead of preparatory or auxiliary activities, then the website/server should be regarded as a permanent establishment, and its business profits will naturally be subject to income tax.

(3) Establish a tax collection and management system that meets the requirements of e-commerce.

E-commerce is an invisible trading activity in the virtual market. Its paperless operation and the mobility of trading participants make the information asymmetry between tax authorities and taxpayers particularly prominent in tax collection and management, which makes there are many "blind spots" and loopholes in tax collection and management in e-commerce, which puts forward higher requirements for tax collection and management mode. To improve the efficiency of existing tax collection and management and avoid the loss of tax sources, the key is to solve the problem of information asymmetry. First, strengthen the construction of the tax authorities' own network, realize the full connection with the Internet and the connection with banks, customs and online business users as soon as possible, realize real online monitoring and inspection, strengthen online cooperation with tax authorities of various countries, prevent tax loss and crack down on tax evasion. The second is to actively implement the e-commerce tax registration system. Taxpayers must go to the competent tax authorities for e-commerce tax registration after handling online transactions, and obtain a special tax registration number. The tax authorities should strictly examine the online transactions declared by taxpayers, register them one by one, and manage taxpayers through tax registration, so that even if taxpayers are anonymous when trading online, they will not pose any threat to tax revenue, and the government can fully grasp who traded what through the Internet. The third is to solve the problem of tax collection and management of e-commerce from the payment system and put an end to the loss of tax sources. Although obtaining relevant e-commerce has strong liquidity and concealment, as long as there is a transaction, there will be an exchange of money and goods. We can regard the payment system established and used by e-commerce as a means to check, track and monitor the transaction behavior. Because some interest mechanisms of suppliers and consumers in preventing fraud have increased, and because some aspects need to involve banks, it is impossible for businessmen involved in transactions to remain completely anonymous. In addition, such a payment system provides clues to determine turnover. Therefore, it is very promising to solve the tax problem in e-commerce from the payment system.