Author | Yan Lili
Today, the internet celebrity live broadcast industry set off an uproar, and Li Jiaqi is the same as the two major oligarchs of the live broadcast industry with goods, and something happened.
Wei Ya, real name Huang Wei, known as "live broadcast a sister", "queen with goods", not only that, she is also a singer, a member of the All-China Youth Federation, not only a "global good thing recommendation officer", but also on the "2020 Forbes China Celebrity List". He has also been awarded the titles of "Post-disaster Help and Love Public Welfare Ambassador" and "National Advanced Individual in Poverty Alleviation".
Today, these outstanding people erected by the famous name have collapsed!
According to Xinhua News Agency, in the short two years from 2019 to 2020, Wei Ya evaded taxes by 643 million yuan and underpaid taxes by 0.6 billion yuan, and the Hangzhou Municipal Taxation Bureau in Zhejiang Province made a tax administrative treatment penalty decision on Wei Ya, recovering taxes, collecting late fees and imposing fines totaling 1.341 billion yuan.
That's an astronomical number! You know, Wang Lihong, a literary and art star who flipped over the car on the weekend, several women tore up the total family property is only a few hundred million. Via's tax arrears will pay 1.3 billion yuan...
It can be seen how moist the life of today's top stream Internet celebrities is.
After the report came out, it quickly fermented on the Internet, and Via reacted quickly, changing her previous attitude of ignoring the answer, apologizing for the tax evasion incident, and said, "Fully accept the relevant penalty decisions made by the tax department according to law, and will actively raise funds to complete the payment of taxes, late fees and fines within the specified time." ”
But it was too late. Soon after, Via's live streaming account on Taobao was frozen. A live broadcast scheduled for tonight was also cancelled.
1
Three major tax evasion methods were exposed
Wei Ya's punishment also caused an uproar among netizens, and after the official Weibo account of CCTV News released the news, in just 2 hours, the related discussion below exceeded 146,000, and the number of likes soared by more than 3.7 million. Wang Lihong and his family, as well as the ghostwriters of his "flower fields"—can finally breathe a sigh of relief...
Some netizens asked: How did Wei Ya pay less taxes? The head of the tax department said that between 2019 and 2020, There are three ways for Via to evade taxes:
1. Evading taxes by concealing the commission income obtained from the live broadcast platform;
2. Through the establishment of a number of sole proprietorships and partnerships such as Shanghai Weihe Enterprise Management Consulting Center and Shanghai Dusu Enterprise Management Consulting Partnership, the fictitious business of the partnership, the income from labor remuneration such as commissions and pit fees obtained by the individual engaged in live streaming is converted into the business income of the enterprise for false declaration and tax evasion;
3 Engaging in other production and business activities to obtain income, but failing to declare and pay taxes in accordance with law.
According to industry insiders, the head anchor with goods basically does not pay the individual tax directly, among the three means, the anchor tax evasion is the most important way is the second point - to turn personal income into company income. Through the establishment of sole proprietorships, partnerships and other forms, to achieve the difference between the tax subjects and taxes, the use of different tax payment amounts (such as the individual more than 960,000 yuan in the whole year will be levied up to 45% tax rate, while the enterprise income tax is generally only 25% and even have various forms of tax reduction policies), to achieve the purpose of paying less tax or even no tax.
According to reports, after the double 11, most of the tax approvals of the head anchors are in Chongming Island, Shanghai, which is known as the "tax depression", and the sole proprietorships in the park have superior tax refund policies. In some tax planning advertisements on Shanghai Chongming Island, it can be seen that "the establishment of sole proprietorship, the application for approval and collection, of which the enterprise income tax is fully exempted, the individual income tax is as low as 0.5%, the comprehensive tax burden is as low as 1.6%, and the effective tax saving is 96%".
Some analysts believe that some insatiable anchors will choose not to pay dividends, when it is necessary to purchase assets, in the name of the company, take the public account, although the assets are hung under the company's name, but the anchors as the actual controller of the company, can enjoy the company's assets without scruples. At the same time, the assets hanging in the company's name can also be depreciated as the company's fixed assets and deducted from the company's income tax, killing two birds with one stone.
Wei Ya related topics are directly dominating the front row of Weibo's hot search list, under the leadership of "live broadcast sister", other traffic anchors in the Taobao live broadcast field are also frequently appearing on the hot search list, including Li Jiaqi, another major oligarch of live broadcasting, and Sydney, who was also in turmoil last month because of tax issues.
I remember that a month ago, the anchors with goods Sydney and Lin Shanshan were also fined for tax problems. The specific reason is to set up sole proprietorship enterprises in Shanghai, Guangxi, Jiangxi and other places, and the fictitious business will convert the income from personal wages, salaries and labor remuneration obtained by them into the operating income of the sole proprietorship enterprise, and evade personal income tax.
In this regard, netizens have lamented the huge profits of the live broadcast industry and criticized the disdainful behavior of high-income people; there are also more people who lament that ordinary people work diligently to pay taxes according to law, and these rich people also do tax evasion and evasion.
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The live streaming industry is no longer a regulatory blind spot
Recently, many traffic anchors have "overturned" on tax issues, which is actually inseparable from a background, that is, the promotion of national supervision.
In February this year, the Cyberspace Administration of China and seven other departments jointly issued the Guiding Opinions on Strengthening the Standardized Management of Online Live Broadcasting, followed by the State Administration for Market Regulation formally formulated the Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Online Transactions, which clearly regulated the excessive collection of personal information by operators, the tying of goods, live streaming with goods, and the choice of one of the two.
In May this year, the Cyberspace Administration of China and seven other departments jointly issued the Administrative Measures for Online Live Broadcasting Marketing (Trial Implementation), which specifically mentioned the legal tax obligations of relevant participants in the live broadcasting marketing industry, laying the most critical patch for the e-commerce live broadcasting industry.
In September this year, the General Office of the State Administration of Taxation issued the Notice on Carrying Out Comprehensive Governance in the Cultural and Entertainment Sector (hereinafter referred to as the Notice). The "Circular" proposes to further strengthen the daily tax management of practitioners in the field of culture and entertainment, and to guide individual studios and enterprises established by star artists and network anchors to establish an account system in accordance with laws and regulations, and to declare and pay taxes by means of accounting and collection; it is necessary to regularly carry out "double random, one open" tax inspections of star artists and network anchors, take the facts as the basis and the law as the yardstick, and increase the intensity of investigation and punishment of typical cases of tax evasion in the cultural and entertainment fields in accordance with laws and regulations.
The Taobao live broadcast industry "oligarch" Wei Ya was punished for tax evasion, but also fully emphasized the determination of the tax authorities to severely crack down on the crime of tax evasion in the field of culture and entertainment, in an interview with Xinhua News Agency, the head of the tax department said that it has always attached importance to and continued to regulate the tax order of the online live broadcasting industry.
From this point of view, the entertainment industry is no longer a regulatory blind spot in the eyes of criminals in the past, and the supervision of tax-related issues in the entertainment field will continue to become stricter in the future.
In addition, there is also a noteworthy point in the Xinhua news agency report that Wei Ya is suspected of major tax evasion, which was discovered by the tax authorities through the analysis of tax big data analysis. Previously, some media broke the news that the Zhengzhou Jinshui District Taxation Bureau pursued 6.6244 million yuan of taxes from an Internet celebrity, in this case, the Zhengzhou Jinshui District Taxation Bureau also extracted data through tax big data means, so as to analyze and evaluate the internet celebrity's tax evasion behavior.
It can be seen that the Internet is not an illegal foreign land, and now under the empowerment of digital technology, the improvement of the tax supervision ability of the online live broadcasting industry is inevitable, and everyone can no longer take chances and should consciously pay taxes according to law.
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Where is the live streaming industry going
Before 2019, live e-commerce still stayed in the stage of personal IP and e-commerce platform testing, but in the context of the rapid rise of short videos, especially the impact of the epidemic on the offline physical consumption industry in 2020, the live broadcast of Internet celebrities began to explode rapidly, and under the impetus of a large amount of capital intervention, the Internet celebrity economy and MCN institutions showed explosive growth momentum and became one of the main ways of online sales in various industries.
According to the "2021 China Live E-commerce Industry Research Report" released by iResearch, the scale of China's live e-commerce market in 2020 will exceed 1.2 trillion yuan, with an annual growth rate of 197.0%, and the number of anchor employees in the industry will soar by 1.234 million, while iResearch estimates that the scale of live e-commerce will exceed 4.9 trillion yuan in 2023.
However, the development of this industry is too fast, so that there are many industry chaos in the process of brutal development, and more and more problems are exposed by the live e-commerce model.
Among them, including the misconduct of live broadcast celebrities, distorted guidance of consumers' values, false publicity and data fraud, and the frequent appearance of counterfeit and shoddy goods.
Some head Internet celebrities with the increase in popularity has a large amount of traffic, so the formation of a strong bargaining power for goods with goods, in order to shout out the "lowest price in the industry", broadcasters are more inclined to squeeze the suppliers, resulting in some brands even appear through live selling more and more loss of "loss of money" situation.
More critically, as the platform's algorithm mechanism tilts a large amount of public domain traffic to the live broadcast room of the head anchor, resulting in other non-head anchors or peers without the ability to participate in live broadcasting with goods cannot get traffic attention, the living space of a large number of small and medium-sized brands and businesses is increasingly squeezed, and survival competition is becoming more and more difficult, which leads to vicious polarization and unfairness in industry competition
Not only that, the rise of online celebrity live streaming with goods has also caused a dimensionality reduction blow to many non-Internet celebrity industries offline, and in the context of the impact of the epidemic, the offline economy has been seriously impacted, the ecology is difficult to survive, and it will also have an adverse impact on social stability.
On the other hand, these head anchors have become the biggest winners in this new economic model, their own income has increased sharply but their legal awareness is weak, malicious tax evasion and tax evasion, recently under the strict inspection and supervision of the national tax department, a large number of star anchors broke out tax evasion incidents, exposing the fact that tax evasion in the industry is widespread.
It can be seen from the negative events that have broken out one after another that there are still many aspects of the regulatory loopholes in this industry that need to be patched, not only for merchants, platforms, broadcasters and even the orientation of the entire model.
But in general, it is undeniable that live e-commerce, a new economic model that has risen rapidly in recent years, has played a great role in promoting the changes in China's consumption patterns, and to some extent, it has also accelerated the progress of China's economic digital development. In this regard, the state also welcomes the positive development of this industry, but the biggest premise is that the relevant stakeholders must strictly abide by relevant laws and regulations, operate in accordance with discipline and law, and pay taxes in accordance with laws and regulations.
Seeing its tall buildings and seeing its building collapse, Wei Ya's tax evasion was severely punished, which once again sounded the alarm for every participant in the live e-commerce industry.
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epilogue
The rise of the new online economic model of Internet e-commerce has certainly changed the retail industry and played a great role in promoting China's economy to be more efficient, but it has also indeed encroached on the living space of other entities and brought many unfair phenomena.
Taking live e-commerce as an example, the brand side crosses the intermediate link and directly contacts consumers with the mouth of the anchor, although it improves the efficiency of retail, but it greatly hits the channel dealers, so that capital and interests are more concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people, especially the traditional retail industry offline, causing a dimensionality-reducing blow, which is obviously contrary to the principle of common prosperity that the country is now advocating.
Efficiency and fairness have never been able to have both, but in the long run, one leg is long and one leg is short, which will inevitably drag down our development steps, and how to better balance it fairly on the basis of maintaining efficiency is a topic facing the Chinese.