How To Check Your Tax Record in China

China has made many tax abatement reforms since 2017, most particularly, a significant individual income tax reduction policy in Oct 2018. People who work in China benefit a lot from this new regulation.

In the meantime, the Chinese government’s rules on tax declaration has become more strict in an effort to counteract tax avoidance. The tax record become more and more important and will soon be linked to the paperwork required for almost any formal procedure, for example, your work permit renewal. You must provide your tax report before getting approved to continue with any kind of legal procedure in most major Chinese cities (in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen only part of applications(apply by point system) require this tax report, however it will soon become mandatory for all.)

How to know whether your tax report is qualified?
The salary stated by your company or agent in your work permit application form will be the standard againt which the bureau will check your tax payments.

How do you check your tax records?

Here’s the 4 ways:

1.Print by your accountant if you work in a company
However, this is not a full version and only show your salary income tax records under this company and can not for the work permit renewal procedure.

2. Apply in the Tax Bureau Hall
You can also go to any tax bureau hall to print your tax report or hire an agent to print for you, this is a full version with tax bureau stamp and your tax number.

Or if you have the “Registration Code” or your passport activated in the tax system, you can also print the tax report on any of the ARM machine on the Self-Help Tax Service Hall.

Here is the most formal tax report from the tax bureau:

3. Apply online or by app
To visit https://gr.tax.sh.gov.cn/webchart as an example

1) You’ll see the login screenshot as below:

2) As we tested, the Alipay verification only avaiable for Chinese but not foreigners, we suggest foreigner to apply a “Registration Code” in the local tax bureau.

3) This “Registration Code” can be easily applied from any of the tax bureau hall for foreigners or you can ask an agent to apply for you.

4) When you register and log in, you’ll see the below screenshot, click on “Individual Income Tax Report Application” (“个人所得税纳税清单查询和申请”)

5) You’ll see all your 2018 tax records here, click the arrow on the right side to see all the details, including which company paid the tax on your behalf, the amount of salary declared anda amount of taxes paid for every month.

6) Click the “Tax list and report application”(“申请纳税清单”) and the system will organize the report and send it to your pointed email.

This is the final version of the tax report that you will get, this one can be for work permit renewal or any other procedure:

4. Apply via Alipay on your phone
This is the easiest and fastest way to apply tax report, follow our steps here:

1) Open your Alipay app and click on “CityService”

2) Click “Government Affairs”(“政务”)

3) Slide down a little bit and click “Tax Hall”(“税务大厅”)

4) Then we’ll see the homepage of the tax system

The left steps will be the same as the one in the website or app.