According to the State Administration of Taxation, the project, which will be operational by July 1 of this year, will concentrate on keeping track of value-added tax payments in addition to supervising taxpayers' business activities and standardizing the behavior of tax collectors.

In an important step towards full implementation of the "Golden Tax Project," taxation authorities on Monday introduced certification monitoring and information management systems in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing municipalities and Jiangsu, Shandong, Liaoning, Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces. The systems will be put in place across the country in July.

Last December, taxation authorities required a select group of companies, including industrial enterprises with annual sales of more than 1 million yuan (US$120,000) and commercial enterprises with annual sales of more than 1.8 million yuan (US$216,900), to use an anti-fraud monitoring system for business transactions.

These companies now print invoices using a computerized system that is connected to the State Administration of Taxation computers.

By the end of 2002, all companies will be required to install and use the monitoring system, a spokesman said, adding that China will ban the use of hand-written invoices by January 1, 2003.

Anticipating an increased number of tax receipts resulting from China's expanding economic growth, taxation authorities have been trying computerize tax collection and management activities over the past several years.

In some of the nation's bigger cities, paper-based bean counting has been largely replaced by accounting software and many pay their taxes by telephone or via the Internet.

China's tax bureaux were equipped with nearly 200,000 computers by the end of 1999. Seventy percent of total tax revenues were processed using computers last year, according to the spokesman.

(China Daily 01/02/2001)