Smart tools were used more deeply than before in the 2025 corporate income tax annual settlement. Zhong Wubin, party secretary and director of the Xuzhou tax bureau, said more than 270,000 enterprises in the city must file annual corporate income tax returns, averaging 10 forms each, which is like finding a needle in a haystack for humans; the intelligent audit tool they built automatically links filing data, invoice information and financial statements, carries 63 risk indicators, and last year pinpointed 7,625 risk points, prompting companies to self-check and pay 24.34 million yuan in tax and late fees and cutting declared losses by 77.82 million yuan. Wasted effort fell 30 percent and risk-checking accuracy rose from 75 to 92 percent. Still, those interviewed stress that machines only sort by rules and perform standard cross-checks and cannot replace professional judgment. Zhong noted that for complex cases such as corporate restructuring or policy-driven relocation, systems can only compare conventional data logic and cannot judge business substance or whether policy application is reasonable, so tax officials still had to make the final call. Chen Yugang, general manager of Zhongke Xunlian Smart Network Technology (Beijing), said for cross-industry R&D, overseas commissioned R&D, and shared equipment cost allocation between R&D and production, models can only flag suspicions, and taking machine output at face value risks improper tax benefits. Yang Jinping, deputy general manager of Tianyang Junhe Group, warned that tools mainly read accounting subject codes and names, so results deviate when companies customize their charts of accounts, making manual review essential along with attention to information security and client authorization.
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China Tax News: Smart Tools Aid Corporate Income Tax Settlement, but Human Judgment Remains Irreplaceable
Smart tools were used more deeply in China's 2025 corporate income tax annual settlement. An intelligent audit tool built by the Xuzhou tax bureau carries 63 risk indicators and last year pinpointed 7,625 risk points, prompting companies to self-correct and pay 24.34 million yuan in tax and late fees while cutting declared losses by 77.82 million yuan; wasted effort fell 30 percent and risk-checking accuracy rose from 75 to 92 percent. Officials and practitioners interviewed stress that such tools only handle standard cross-checks and anomaly screening, and that complex cases such as corporate restructuring, policy-driven relocation and cross-industry R&D still require human review and professional judgment, along with attention to data quality and security.
2026-09-16