Help industrial pollution control grow rapidly, environmental tax is hard to solve "two skins"

The draft environmental protection tax law was submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress for the first time on 29 th. Public opinion holds that paying taxes is the main direction of reform, and it will also strengthen the restraint on taxpayers'environmental pollution behavior. In order to realize the effective landing of environmental protection tax, it is necessary to define the object of tax collection and to adjust the scope of tax collection reasonably so as to accurately develop polluting enterprises; at the same time, the effective cooperation and division of labor between tax and environmental protection departments should be strengthened, and a reasonable environmental protection tax collection and management system should be formulated.

The draft law on environmental protection tax was submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress for the first time on the 29th. The draft proposed to levy environmental protection tax in China. With the advance of the legislative procedure, the current 18 tax categories in China are expected to increase to 19.

According to the draft, the taxpayers of environmental protection tax shall be enterprises, institutions and other producers and operators directly discharging taxable pollutants into the environment in the territory of the People's Republic of China and other sea areas under the jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China. Taxable pollutants are air pollutants, water pollutants, solid wastes and noise. Lou Jiwei, Minister of Finance, said in a note to the draft that the legislation is in accordance with the principle of "shifting the tax burden" to transfer the current sewage fee system to the environmental protection tax system. Since 1979, China has established a sewage discharge fee system. In 2015, 17.3 billion yuan of sewage discharge fees were levied, with 280,000 paying households.

Considering the great differences among different places, the draft authorizes provincial governments to float the applicable tax amount of taxable pollutants on the basis of the tax standard stipulated in the Environmental Protection Tax Items and Taxes Scale, and submit it to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress at the same level for decision, and to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and the State Council for the record.

The draft also proposes that if the concentration of taxable air pollutants and water pollutants discharged by taxpayers is lower than 50% of the pollutant discharge standards stipulated by the state or local authorities, the environmental protection tax shall be levied in half. In order to avoid further increasing the use cost, taxable pollutants discharged from mobile pollution sources such as motor vehicles, ships and aircraft are exempted from duty.

New opportunities for environmental protection industry

In response, Chen Jining, the Minister of environmental protection, has publicly responded that this is not to increase taxes, but to encourage enterprises to reduce emissions, pay more taxes and pay less taxes. "Tax means can promote social energy conservation and emission reduction, guide consumption, transform the mode of economic development, and promote industrial transformation and upgrading."

How to link up with the sewage discharge fee system, the draft stipulates that the taxable atmospheric pollutants of each outlet or no outlet shall be sorted according to the pollution equivalent from large to small, and the environmental protection tax shall be levied on the first three pollutants; the taxable water pollutants of each outlet shall be sorted according to the pollution equivalent from large to small, and the heavy metal pollutants shall be sorted according to the first five items. Other environmental pollutants shall be levied in accordance with the first 3 items.

The draft sets the current discharge fee as the lower limit of the environmental tax, which stipulates that the air pollutant tax is 1.2 yuan per pollution equivalent, the water pollutant tax is 1.4 yuan, the solid waste tax is 5 to 1000 yuan per ton according to different types, and the noise tax is 350 to 1120 yuan per month according to excessive decibels.　　

Luo Jianhua, secretary-general of the Environmental Chamber of Commerce of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, believes that a positive incentive mechanism should be established. In addition to punishing enterprises with serious pollution, enterprises should be encouraged to do well, such as halving tax revenue, leading environmental protection system and so on. The draft clearly states that in order to encourage enterprises to adopt advanced technology to reduce pollutant emissions, taxpayers who discharge taxable atmospheric pollutants and water pollutants whose concentration values are lower than 50% of the pollutant discharge standards stipulated by the state or local authorities shall levy an environmental protection tax by half. Luo Jianhua believes that, compared with municipal environmental protection, the introduction of environmental protection tax will attract enterprises to explore the field of industrial pollution control, the market is much larger than municipal environmental protection.

Levying environmental protection tax will also affect the third party governance. "The third sides are professionally managed, who pollutes them, and the market has great potential." He said.

It is difficult to approve and levy "two pieces of leather".

Since 2003, pollutant discharge fees have been collected by environmental protection bureaus of governments at various levels below the provincial level. The basic operation modes of the fees are closed-ended "self-collection and self-management" and "self-collection and self-support". How much of the 210 billion yuan sewage charge in 13 years has been spent on local environmental protection and environmental restoration? Most ordinary residents do not know. It is predicted that once the environmental protection tax falls to the ground, an average of 16 billion yuan of sewage discharge fee will be levied annually, which will be enlarged to 50 billion yuan of environmental protection tax. The difference between tax and fee is only one word, but the tax should be put into the treasury, the use is hard-bound, and the administrative fees are set up outside the treasury, and the use is relatively arbitrary. Therefore, it is imperative that we only levy the environmental tax on the basis of the efficiency of capital use and the waste charges.

However, the legal risks and challenges faced by environmental tax collection still exist. According to the draft, the local tax authorities are the legally levied organs of environmental protection tax, which is not wrong in itself, but there has been a new situation that has never happened before: before levying environmental protection tax, how much tax should be paid by the taxpayers, one is self-reported, the other is checked and approved by the tax authorities, and then levied by the tax authorities. Environmental protection tax is different, how much tax should be paid, the object of tax collection can not be self-reported, the tax authorities can not verify, must be approved by the local environmental protection bureau for taxable pollutants, tax authorities can levy tax accordingly.

This means that as the first special specialized tax in China, the approval (environmental protection department) and the collection (tax authority) of environmental protection tax are in the "two skins" state. Whether the environmental protection department, as the basis for the collection, can implement local protectionism in accordance with local administrative instructions becomes a key link in whether environmental protection tax can play its role. At present, the only feasible way to solve the "two skins" problem is to change the environmental protection tax to be levied by the state tax department, so as to form a deterrent to the local environmental protection department. As for the specific environmental tax revenue, it can still be returned to local use through appropriate channels.

Appropriate assessment mechanisms should be established.

In fact, China's environmental protection tax system has been decentralized and relatively backward for a long time. The introduction of environmental protection tax will change this situation. The purpose of environmental tax collection is precisely to protect and improve the environment, promote social energy conservation and emission reduction, and promote the construction of ecological civilization. According to the previous draft of the Environmental Protection Law, the environmental protection tax law focuses on monitoring (sewage discharge) taxpayers including thermal power, steel, cement, electrolytic aluminum, coal, metallurgy, building materials, mining, chemical, petrochemical and other key pollution industries taxpayers and other key monitoring enterprises. This will help to curb the development of enterprises with high energy consumption and high pollution and help transform and upgrade the economy.　　

Bai Yanfeng, a professor at the School of Finance of the Central University of Finance and Economics, believes that the environmental protection tax law doubles the tax on enterprises that discharge pollutants beyond the standard and beyond the total amount. This is to make the environmental protection tax "grow teeth" really, and no longer a "paper tiger" to frighten people, and really make the government's environmental protection "hard up".

Regarding the Levy of environmental protection tax law in the future, Bai Yanfeng suggested that the first step is to implement the Levy of fees and fees, to ensure that the environmental protection tax reform does not increase the overall burden of taxpayers, and to make China's economic transformation under the premise of overall controllability. At present, environmental protection tax is generally regarded as a local tax, but Zhu Weiqun thinks that because environmental pollution has become a national problem, the revenue of environmental protection tax should be concentrated by the central government, and the local government also needs environmental protection tax revenue to provide funds for controlling local environmental pollution. This requires the sharing principle of environmental protection tax revenue and the relevant distribution system.

Previously, some legal scholars believed that the scope of environmental protection tax mainly involves a specific link of environmental damage, that is, pollutant discharge, focusing on terminal treatment, has a certain financing function. Zhu Weiqun said that as a tax for specific policy purposes, environmental tax should be assessed through appropriate mechanisms to ensure that the public can understand whether the purpose of the Levy of environmental tax is achieved and how far it is achieved, so as to prevent it from becoming a mere means of financing for the government.