The New Power Party (NPP) yesterday said it would propose a draft taxpayer protection act to establish a tax court, employ taxpayer protection officers and prevent tax authorities from abusing their power, and that a proposed constitutional amendment aimed at lowering the minimum voting age had gained traction.
The draft act aims to ensure the right to basic living standards by excluding a minimum living expenses from taxable income, the party said.
A fair tax plan includes a progressive tax system that levies taxes according to taxpayers’ ability to pay, as well as measures prohibiting tax evasion while allowing reasonable tax breaks, it said.
The draft act also seeks to establish a tax court and employ taxpayer protection officers to help taxpayers exercise their rights.
“About half of the cases being processed by administrative courts are tax disputes, but there are only a handful of judges who are trained in taxation and accounting,” NPP Executive Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said. “If the court rules against tax authorities in a tax dispute, taxpayers do not necessarily benefit from the verdict, because tax authorities generally reissue a tax bill that is largely the same as the disputed tax bill.”
Tax authorities have ignored taxpayers’ rights even in the face of a court verdict, resulting in the so-called “thousand-year tax bill” situation, in which taxpayers cannot be freed from inappropriate taxation, Huang said.
“Tax protection officers are like consumer protection officers, and they would be trusted with the mission of protecting taxpayers’ rights. The implementation of tax protection officers has been a shared goal among political parties, and it was a promise that former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) failed to realize,” he said.
The draft act also includes an administrative relief system designed to free taxpayers from prolonged legal entanglement.
National Taipei University of Business taxation professor Huang Shih-chou (黃士洲) said a taxpayer protection clause of the Tax Collection Act (稅捐稽徵法) is virtually useless, because the courts have issued only two rulings favorable to taxpayers citing the protection clause since its enactment.
The draft act would hopefully redress the imbalance of the law that has overstressed taxpayers’ obligations, but downplayed their rights, Huang Shih-chou said.
Meanwhile, NPP Legislator Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said a constitutional amendment proposed by the party last week to lower the minimum voting age from 20 to 18 had garnered the support of more than 30 lawmakers, and the amendment is expected to pass a first reading in the near future.
The party has been trying to push for two other proposed amendments to the Constitution that aim to abolish the Taiwan Provincial Government and remove the “one country, two areas” article in the Constitution, but the party has encountered difficulties, Hsu said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,