Shanghai Tax: Building a World-Class Tax Business Environment with Digital Empowerment

Building a market-oriented, law-based and internationalized business environment is a key task assigned to Shanghai. Taxation is one of the critical factors. In recent years Shanghai's tax authorities have persisted in institutional innovation, digital empowerment and openness. Shanghai pioneered an advance tax ruling system among provincial tax bodies, publishing seven rulings covering complex scenarios. A national tax tribunal was set up in Shanghai in February 2024, and administrative review timelines for simple cases have been cut from 60 to 30 days. Leveraging digital transformation, Shanghai built a diversified tax service system covering fully online handling, taxpayer-authority interaction, self-service and in-person channels; most business can now be completed online via the e-tax bureau or the "one-stop government service" platform. Automatic adjustment of housing fund contribution bases now serves nearly 300,000 enterprises and 4 million employees. Online service improvements have cut physical service windows by 30% and window transactions by 25%. Through the "bank-tax interaction" platform, over RMB 501 billion in credit loans have been extended to small firms in partnership with 61 banks. Shanghai also built the "Tax Road" cross-border service brand, with over 2,000 registered departure tax refund stores and multilingual 12366 hotline services in nine foreign languages with 24/7 response.