Tax dodgers on the Chinese mainland paid 36.7 billion yuan (US$4.4 billion) in overdue taxes, late fees and fines last year as a result of a crackdown on tax evasion, according to Liu Taiming, director of the Inspection Bureau of the State Administration of Taxation.

Tax agencies across China conducted audits last year of 1.2 million taxpayers, said Liu at a Tuesday press conference. Audit departments at and above the county level dealt with 523,000 cases involving various types of tax-related offenses.

Fraud involving value-added taxes accounts for the lion's share of offenses, according to Liu. Most of the 10 major tax fraud cases highlighted at the press conference involved evasion by falsifying VAT information.

Liu said that this year, tax inspections will be conducted in nine areas, including the real estate, steel and cement industries.

"Besides nationwide checks on personal income tax, local tax bureaus will focus on two or three of the nine areas in accordance with their own situation," he said.

The other target industries are coal production and transportation, motorcycle production and sales, waste collection, farm products processing and export companies that have asked for tax rebates.

One economist said that in light of the enormous number of enterprises in China, there will always be some that attempt to slip through cracks in the system. In the first quarter of this year, efforts to narrow those cracks resulted in a 20.4 percent year-on-year increase in tax revenue, to 756 billion yuan (US$91.1 billion).

(Xinhua News Agency, China Daily April 20, 2005)