The Pollution Discharge Tax Should Be Levied.

Levying the environmental tax will become one of the tax policies that the government has focused on in 2008.

The specific research and development work is jointly carried out by the Ministry of Finance and taxation, the local tax department of the State Administration of Taxation and the three Department of the policy and regulation department of the State Environmental Protection Administration.

In November 2007, the research report completed by Dr. Sun Gang and Dr Xu Wen of the Ministry of finance made three options for environmental taxes.

First, general environmental taxes, which aim at raising revenue, are generally collected according to the principle of "beneficiaries pay".

The tax base can be equivalent to or attached to the tax base of the existing related taxes, such as urban maintenance and construction tax, enterprise income tax and so on, which is equivalent to the addition of these taxes.

The two is the pollution emission tax. The principle of collection is "polluter pays", and the tax base is directly related to the quantity of pollutants.

According to the types of pollutants directly discharged, the corresponding taxes include sulfur tax, nitrogen oxide tax, carbon tax, sewage tax and solid waste tax.

The three is the pollution product tax, the principle is "user pay", the object is the potential pollution products, mainly energy fuel, ozone depleting substances, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, phosphorus detergent, mercury and cadmium batteries and so on.

Corresponding pollution products tax can be levied, such as fuel environmental tax, special pollution product tax and so on.

In the view of the Ministry of finance, first of all, it is more urgent and more pragmatic to "greening" the existing taxes.

The so-called "tax greening", that is, through the reform and improvement of the existing tax categories, reflects the requirements of environmental protection, such as raising the tax burden of resource tax and consumption tax, expanding the scope of Taxation, and changing the way of collecting taxes.