Suzhou Expat - The expatriate portal in China

There is a new policy that people with income > 120K will need to claim tax by themselves.

Who Should Follow the Self-Claim Routine?

Anyone who have annual income above 120K RMB should self-claim his/her tax to the tax bureau from Jan 1 to March 31 from this year.

Personal annual income includes not only salary, it also include bonus, income for labor, interest, stock dividends, author's remuneration, copyright royalty, rent of property, transfer of property, accidental income and other income.

From the list, it seems any money that goes into someone's pocket should be claimed. There are some exception, but none of them seem to be common to normal people.

Tax rate for most of the items are 20%.

How to Claim it?

For example the shanghai tax bureau provides a hot line: 12366 to handle questions. People can go to their office to claim between 8:30 to 16:30, from Monday to Saturday.

What is the Status?

In the most important national wide news time from 7:00 to 7:30 PM, there is an update for the status yesterday. 9 days after the policy was announced, there are 1253 persons claimed it in Beijing, 400 for other cities, and no one claimed in some cities.

When I search the news on Internet, many cities didn't see anyone come to their office to claim.

According to some (unconfirmed) sources, people we didn't claim their tax will be charged up to 5 times of 50% of their tax due.

Shanghai anounce the new policy allready on there official Tax bureau hompage. You can check it (only chinese) under http://www.csj.sh.gov.cn/gb/csj/csxx/csdt/userobject7ai24481.html.  

How about the Policy?

I am pretty sure that this policy will be among the countless policies that no one follow. Just like the ICP license policy issued in 2000, it was not enforced until the year of 2006.

For this one? It times time, maybe for 5 years for this policy to be really enforced. This can be a problem in China that laws and regulations are not accepted easily, just because the process of drafting these laws didn't involve the people.