On The Joint Debt Of Tax

Joint debt obligation is the joint tax liability that assumed by various tax obligors to tax authority. On the one hand, the practice of bringing in the joint debt obligation in civil law into tax law is to expand the tax paying credit of tax obligators, ensure the realization of tax liability and increase tax collecting efficiency; on the other hand, such practice is made in the consideration that tax obligation integrates both public law and private law as well as the priority of tax obligatory right. Divided by the difference of causes, tax joint obligation can be further divided into the one established on tax law and the one extended on civil law, legal tax joint obligation and contractual tax joint obligation, true tax joint obligation and untrue tax joint obligation. The scope of validity of tax joint obligation includes the external validity, internal validity, substantial law validity and procedural law validity.The essential problem of tax joint obligation is the performance of joint obligation. It includes two aspects:first is the external performance of tax joint obligation, i.e. the behavior of collecting tax debts and the corresponding overdue fine from one or multiple tax obligators by tax authority; second is the internal recovery of tax joint obligations, i.e. the behavior of recovering from other joint tax obligators for the excessive due tax shares under the circumstances that tax joint obligators have cleared off the tax payment.The tax law currently effective in China does not include systematic speculation on tax joint obligation, accompanying with the problems such as lack of internal recovery mechanism and the indefinite external performance mode of tax joint obligation. To safeguard the national tax revenue and the legal rights of tax obligators, tax law in China should ascertain that the general joint liability policy in civil law be referred to by tax joint obligation; establish the basic application suitability of tax joint obligation; optimize the external performance and internal recovery regulation of tax joint liability.