Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said yesterday that despite various tax cutting measures, the country’s tax revenue had increased this year, indicating that the domestic economy is improving and tax reductions benefited average citizens.
The government collected a total of NT$388.5 billion (US$12.29 billion) in taxes in the first four months of this year, representing a year-on-year growth of 15.4 percent, Wu said, quoting the latest Ministry of Finance figures.
“The growing tax revenue indicates that Taiwan’s economic climate has rebounded,” Wu said at a Cabinet meeting in which he heard reports from ministry officials on this year’s tax revenues.
The premier said reductions offered by the ministry on composite income tax, alcohol and tobacco tax, commodity tax and inheritance tax, helped achieve the government’s goal of taking better care of citizens by reducing their overall tax burden.
Meanwhile, Deputy Minister of Finance Chang Sheng-ford (張盛和) said that strong growth in revenues from the composite income tax, business tax and commodity tax over the past four months clearly indicated that the domestic economy “has been recovering briskly.”
He attributed the economic recovery in part to remittances from Taiwanese businesspeople operating in China that have helped fuel domestic investment.
Chang estimated that the ministry would collect more than NT$1.6 trillion in tax this year, with total revenues expected to increase by 5.6 percent, or NT$86.4 billion, from the previous year.
He attributed the increase in the first four months of the year mainly to a surge in land value increment tax revenues, which stood at NT$24.6 billion, a rise of NT$11.9 billion, or 93.6 percent, from the same period last year.
This marked the largest growth in history in terms of January-April land value increment tax revenues, Chang said, adding that the figure showed trading in the real estate market is far brisker than a year earlier.
Accumulated securities transaction tax revenues reached NT$34.2 billion in the four-month period, up NT$8.8 billion from the same period last year, according to the ministry’s statistics.
Chang said that salary earners contributed only about 55 percent of the country’s total revenue from composite income tax last year.
He added that nearly 71 percent of the country’s taxpayers pay less than 13 percent in income tax.
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