After an official from the Ministry of Finance recently claimed “huge difficulties” and “unavailability” in collecting family income tax to replace the current personal income tax, an article in Beijing Youth Daily suggested some changes to the personal tax refunding system.

Excerpts:

It is absurd and irresponsible for a government official to refuse to adopt a family income tax, which is widely believed to be more fair, and to replace an individual income tax on some claimed “difficulties”. Actually, his claimed difficulties, like the huge number of families living in different regions, are only minor technical obstacles to the reform and can be solved if they are determined enough.

But introducing the family income tax to replace the individual income tax faces another problem of strengthening the power of tax collecting departments. For many years, the tax department has insisted on collecting a personal income tax because they could simply take the money from workers long before it arrives in their accounts. If the family income tax is introduced to replace the personal income tax, the collectors will have to wait for the residents’ claims for taxes; they might require more power to ensure they could finish the job.

Besides, collecting family income might bring new injustices. The individual income tax has long been criticized for taking money out of workers’ pockets without considering our actual family conditions; but the problem cannot be solved by family income tax alone, because different families have different living costs. Just imagine a family with a sick, old bedridden man, which has to pay the same amount of money to support the bureaucrats as a family with a healthy old man.

So a family income tax might not be a much better choice than the current personal income tax. It is more advisable to introduce a personal refunding system, where those with a heavier family burden and less family income can apply to get their money back to support daily living. That would achieve similar effects with the family income tax, but without giant reforms to the current system; therefore I think it is more practical and could be sampled in certain regions.

Translated by Zhang Zhouxiang