The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus said yesterday that a proposed amendment to the Income Tax Act (所得稅法) would be the party’s main focus in the extra session that begins tomorrow, saying that it is the most important bill to address the issue of “tax justice” in the wake of the revelation of Taiwanese businesspeople’s exploitation of tax havens to avoid paying taxes.
“[The DPP] is proposing this to highlight our call for tax justice and as another test for the Chinese Nationalist Party’s [KMT] core values,” DPP caucus convener Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) told a press conference.
The press conference was held before the legislative agenda is to be decided in an informal meeting today, in which lawmakers are to discuss the bill proposals to be listed on the agenda of the two-day extra session.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
A two-year investigation project, conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), found that more than 16,000 Taiwanese used “paper companies” in tax havens, such as the British Virgin Islands, to evade taxes.
The Chinese-language CommonWealth Magazine, a partner outlet of the consortium, estimated that up to NT$280 billion (US$9.23 billion) was kept abroad over the past 10 years to avoid taxes.
The DPP planned to propose amending Article 43 of the Income Tax Act to stop corporates from using overseas subsidiaries and paper companies to avoid taxation, Ker said.
The government’s failure to reform tax regulations produced a strange tax revenue structure, in which salaried workers contributed 75 percent of the total tax revenues, Ker said, adding that the tax rate of 12.8 percent in Taiwan ranked seventh lowest in the world and the lowest among Asian countries.
“Taiwan’s tax regulations have always favored the rich and large corporates. It is time to change that. We hope the KMT will not stand in the way,” Ker said.
The proposed amendment was going to the plenary session during the last legislative session in April last year until it was pulled from the agenda by the KMT a month later, DPP Legislator Wu Ping-jui (吳秉叡) said.
The DPP argued that amending the tax code would bring about better results to address fairness and justice, DPP Legislator Gao Jyh-peng (高志鵬) said.
The KMT has said that the amendment could lead to an exodus of more Taiwanese businesses and hurt foreign investment, but Gao dismissed those concerns saying that stricter tax regulations have been a global trend and those businesses trying to evade taxes should not be welcome in Taiwan.
Responding to the DPP’s initiative, KMT caucus secretary-general Lin Te-fu (林德福) said yesterday that the party did not oppose amending the law, but it did not welcome sloppy legislation and would prefer to deliberate the bill in the next legislative session.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching