Individual income tax payment is not simply a question of personal responsibility, but should be correlated to unique family conditions, says an article in People's Daily. The following is an excerpt:

A year has passed since the first implementation of a tax policy, which regulates that those who earn more than 120,000 yuan ($16,000) annually are obliged to voluntarily pay individual income tax.

Tax was dodged by many high-income earners in Beijing and Guangzhou early last year. It was reported recently that in Hubei Province, 4,111 income earners above this threshold did not pay the due tax in 2007.

They may argue that they forgot to pay or had not cultivated the sense of voluntarily paying the tax, but we can clearly see they wanted to try their luck to evade the tax.

Paying tax is not simply a question of whether people have the will to do so. It is also related to the question of whether the government can reward those taxpayers by financial policy and protect their interests.

The pity is the inability of some people to fully understand the benefits of paying taxes for public education, healthcare, care for the aged and the unemployed.

On the other hand, the current individual income tax model does not take into account taxpayers' burdens. The tax system should advance with the times and adopt a people-oriented approach to set down appropriate tax ratios.

(China Daily January 8, 2008)