Tax Collection Technology,Actual Tax Burden And Corporate Investment

The deep integration of information technology and tax collection and management is a realistic choice and inevitable requirement for modernizing tax governance capabilities in the era of big data.Although existing studies have emphasized the important role of tax collection technology in improving tax collection capabilities and enhancing collection and administration efficiency.But in general,the economic effects brought by the progress of tax collection technology have not been comprehensively and objectively assessed.On the one hand,the application and promotion of modern information technology in tax collection and management can effectively break the information barriers with taxpayers and third parties,and form a "tax law deterrence" by mastering more tax-related information,thereby effectively reducing corporate tax evasion and doing everything possible to "collect all receivables" to protect the national tax revenue;On the other hand,while tax collection technology reduces the space for tax evasion,it will make the actual tax burden of enterprises close to the nominal tax rate,which will increase the "tax pain" of enterprises in the short term and may affect their business decisions.For this reason,the theoretical community needs to pay close attention to the pros and cons of technological progress in tax collection and management,to provide sufficient empirical evidence for the adjustment and optimization of a country's tax system.The Chinese government has attached great importance to the application and promotion of tax collection and management technologies in the successive tax reforms.Especially in recent years,the construction of "Golden Tax III" project has fully integrated the frontier information technologies such as big data and cloud computing,which is conducive to the taxation authorities to track and record the investment,production,distribution,and consumption behaviors of taxpayers across regions and industries.The three-dimensional presentation of tax-related information of tax-paying companies has greatly improved the tax authority's ability to supervise tax-related information.In essence,this provides a good opportunity for us to scientifically analyze the economic effects of tax collection technology.At the same time,under the constraints of technological progress in tax collection and tax collection capacity in China,exploring its impact on the economic operation is more helpful to further optimize the current "tax reduction" policy,to better promote high-quality economic development.Based on the above theoretical and realistic background,after systematically reviewing relevant domestic and foreign literature,this article first incorporates tax collection and management technology into the traditional "A-S tax evasion model",and theoretically analyzes the impact of technological advances in tax collection on enterprise tax evasion and actual tax burden;Secondly,from the perspective of enterprises' investment behavior,under the framework of "neo-classical investment theory" and "outbound investment decision-making model",we discussed the mechanism of tax shock caused by technological progress in collection and management affecting corporate domestic investment and overseas investment;Finally,based on the above-mentioned mechanism analysis,using the "Quasi-natural experiment" of the "Golden Tax III" project,using the microdata of A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2016,the corresponding theoretical inferences are empirically conducted test.The main research conclusions of the article are as follows:(1)Technological advances in tax collection can effectively improve the government's ability to collect taxes and reduce the space for corporate tax evasion,but at the same time,they also push up the actual tax burden of enterprises to a certain extent.Further heterogeneity analysis shows that technological advances in tax collection and administration have a greater impact on private enterprises with stronger incentives to evade tax,enterprises managed by local tax bureaus,and collusive enterprises with higher information regulation difficulties;At the same time,the impact of technological advances in tax collection and management on corporate tax evasion is more on corporate income tax,while the policy effect of the "Golden Tax III" project is more obvious in regions with higher revenue targets,indicating that the improvement of tax-related information supervision capacity can facilitate local governments to fulfill their revenue tasks.The expansion analysis of the article found that while the advancement of tax collection and management technology pushed up the actual tax burden of enterprises,it also reduced the profitability of enterprises,slowed down the expansion of enterprise assets,and weakened the dividends of current tax reduction policies to a certain extent.At the same time,the advancement of information supervision technology has brought about an increase in government fiscal revenue,providing room for reducing the nominal tax rate of enterprises and further optimizing tax policies.(2)The tax burden impact caused by technological advances in tax collection and management has significantly reduced the scale of corporate investment in domestic fixed assets.Compared with the sample average,corporate investment has fallen by18.8%.The results of the mechanism analysis show that the implementation of the "Golden Tax III" project directly reduces the after-tax income of the company and indirectly weakens the company's cash supply capacity.From the perspective of corporate investment structure,the "Golden Tax Phase III" project not only affected the company's investment in plant and production equipment,but also caused a decline in corporate R&D investment,which is not conducive to the expansion of the company's production,nor is it conducive to the improvement of corporate innovation capabilities.And in the long run,the lack of R&D investment will seriously restrict the long-term development of micro enterprises and macro economy.The analysis at the industry attribute level further reveals that the investment of technology-intensive and laborintensive enterprises has also been hit to different degrees.(3)The changes in the domestic tax environment brought about by the advancement of tax collection and management technology will prompt firms to increase their overseas investments for international tax avoidance motives,raising the probability of outbound investment by about 8% on average.The article verifies the international tax avoidance motives of enterprises through a large number of heterogeneity analyses,and we find that the increase in the probability of enterprises' foreign investment after the implementation of the "Golden Tax Phase III" project mainly exists in the "tax haven sample".And in terms of the strength of international tax avoidance motivation,the higher the actual domestic tax rate,the more obvious the probability of foreign investment.Meanwhile,tax information exchange agreements with tax havens can effectively weaken the incentive of international tax avoidance,and the probability of corporate outward investment is no longer significant in this type of sample.The implementation of transfer pricing through exports to affiliated companies investing overseas is the main method used by Chinese companies to avoid international taxes.The results show that the " Outbound Investment" is more significant among export-oriented enterprises.Further evaluation and calculations show that the international tax avoidance implemented by enterprises through foreign investment has caused significant profit transfer and tax base erosion.This shows that the construction and improvement of a country's “tax governance system” require not only the strong support of domestic tax collection and management technology but also the in-depth participation in international tax affairs.Only the organic integration of domestic and international tax-related resources can maximize safeguard national legitimate tax rights and interests.