The Research On The Improvement Of The Charitable Trust Legal System In China

Trust has a long history of origin relationship with social welfare cause. Moreover, trust plays a crucial role in the development of social welfare in many foreign countries. After the serious Wenchuan Earthquake in 2008, the concern about the application of the donated funds makes the whole society reexamine the special status and functions of charitable trust. Although Trust Law, Administer Method of Trust Corporation have specified the status of charitable trust, the fact is that it is still in an embryonic state and its effectiveness on public good has not been brought into full play.As a matter of fact, charitable trust has many advantages over foundation, such as low cost in setting, high efficiency in supervision and management, being good for maintenance and appreciation of assets value as well as good for the protection of settlor, etc. However, owing to the insufficiency of knowledge as to the advantages of charitable trust by the public, there have not been many cases that people made use of charitable trust to conduct social welfare cause.The incompleteness of legal framework is the underlying reason for the slow development of charitable trust. The stipulation of the aim of charitable trust is over principled, which results in poor operability;it witnesses chaos in the supervision of charitable trust and obscurity in the responsibility and power of various supervision institutions; Tax system relevant to charitable trust is absent. These phenomena have hampered the development of the charitable trust in our country. In order to take full advantage of the superiority of charitable trust in developing social welfare, the government should adopt corresponding countermeasures. The following would be suggested. Complete regulations on the aim of charitable trust; set the principle of non-defining of beneficiary as a criterion of charitable trust; draw up detailed resolution stipulations as to compound public welfare purposes. Optimize supervision system of charitable trust, construct a uniform supervision institution; clear and unify the relations of supervision departments and Banking Supervision Commission, specify the relevant responsibility and power of trust supervisors and confer upon more functions of daily supervision; develop public supervision and choose best supervisors. Complete relevant tax system for charitable trust and it should be defined that the parties to a trust can enjoy the tax categories of tax preference at every step of the whole process of charitable trust. On the identification of duty-free quantification in charitable trust, we can draw ideas from the American experiences to stipulate that charitable trust should be registered in the local general tax authorities and relevant tax preference can be enjoyed upon approval of their applications.