Something new is happening in the software park at Tianjin's Sino-Singapore Eco-City: company staff and tax officials sit down together and go through, item by item, how R&D spending should be accounted for. The park hosts software and computing firms such as iSoftStone and ChinaSoft International, and some companies are applying AI to the low-altitude economy, including a platform called TEDA Huiyan built by Tianjin TEDA Digital Intelligence Technology. The difficulty is that the people writing algorithms also do on-site debugging, so labour costs are hard to split by project; drones and servers are used for both R&D tests and live business, blurring depreciation boundaries; and data-centre computing power costs have no separate metering. The tax office turned these recurring issues into a policy checklist, sent teams into firms for compliance check-ups and issued one risk notice per company. The company then built its own internal control process: daily hour logs, project-based pooling, cross-review, plus equipment and energy ledgers. It says the result is a fourth consecutive year with an A grade in tax payment credit.
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Tianjin tax authorities help software park firms sort out R&D cost compliance
A software park in Tianjin's Sino-Singapore Eco-City hosts software and computing firms, some of which are applying AI to low-altitude economy projects. Because engineers work across projects, equipment is shared between R&D tests and live operations, and data-centre power use cannot be metered per project, allocating R&D expenses is a compliance headache. The local tax office mapped high-frequency risk scenarios into a policy checklist and ran on-site compliance reviews, issuing risk notices firm by firm. One company then built daily time logs, project-based cost pooling and cross-checks, plus equipment ledgers.
2026-09-23