Minister of Finance Lee Sush-der (李述德) said yesterday his ministry favored lowering the ceiling for inheritance and gift taxes to 10 perceAnt from 50 percent to spur economic growth.
Lee made the statement at a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee, which was reviewing the ministry’s budget for next year.
“The ministry is inclined to back the proposal to cap the levy at 10 percent,” Lee said when Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Liao Cheng-ching (廖正井) asked for his stance on the matter.
“The adjustment is more reasonable ... The Cabinet will have the final say on the matter,” Lee said.
A day earlier, the Tax Reform Committee proposed five options: capping the tax at 10 percent, 20 percent, 25 percent or 30 percent or leaving it untouched at 50 percent.
Lee said a cap of 10 percent would cost the national treasury some NT$20 billion (US$617 million) a year, but higher rates would fail to bring overseas Taiwanese capital back to Taiwan.
“The finance ministry considers it better to lower the tax to 10 percent to promote economic growth and social fairness,” Lee told lawmakers.
The inheritance and gift taxes stand at between 2 percent and 50 percent depending on the amount inherited or given.
Some argue that the tax cut is necessary to turn Taiwan into a regional financial center, because Hong Kong and Singapore have both scrapped the levy.
Lee said the ministry also intended to propose raising the tax exemption threshold for gifts and inheritance to NT$12 million from NT$7.79 million.
In addition, the minister said the government was working to lower personal income taxes, with funds to be drawn instead from high-tech companies, which will have to pay more taxes after the Statute for Upgrading Industries (促進產業升級條例) expires next year.
Up to 5 million households are expected to benefit from the income tax cut that still needs approval from the Cabinet and the legislature.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Wei-cher (黃偉哲) said the idea of cutting income tax was a red herring to divert the public’s attention from the dispute over the inheritance levy.
Huang said he and other DPP colleagues would not accept cutting the inheritance and gift taxes to 10 percent and would boycott the proposal in the legislature.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the