The infamous double bookkeeping of Taiwan.
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Need better auditors then.
Auditing isn’t just looking at the books. It’s doing surveillance of the place and from that building a model of business assumptions. How many people are going into the store? How many are walking out with high-end merchandise? How many employees are there? What’s the monthly rent?
it’s not culture, more of a sport.
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Seems you arent so familiar with taiwanese audits. They do that for big fish, but taiwan is so rich, and so lazy, they barely blink at anythig under 30 mil nt…
Like it or not, the day taiwan gets firm on income related laws is the day taiwan goes under and china moves in. Reality 
they take it slow for a reason. Frankly their knee jerk strategy is actually terrible for taiwan long term as theycenavle old rich companies and come down hard on start ups. Not ideal if a long lifespan is considered desirable.
It’s not so much that there’s a culture of tax dodging in Taiwan as there isn’t a culture of tax thievery. Taiwanese culture is too practical to kill off its economy for some ideology. As long as the bills are paid it doesn’t matter if successful people get to keep a chunk of their money.
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…Landlords keep their money.
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It also means landlords won’t let me register my household in rented house because they’re dodging tax.
Which also means if I wanted to apply for low income benefit, I can’t, because all government benefit in Taiwan is based on houkou.
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I live in a newly constructed apartment complex owned by a real estate company. They give me a stamped receipt every month for rent and maintenance fees. So I’m assuming that there is no issue of the landlord not paying tax. Will there be any benefit to claiming itemized deductions when I file my taxes or should I just go with the standard deduction?
If your rent is a really large expense, then claim itemized. Otherwise go with standard.
I hear that!! So many things i/we hav missed out on over time because we dont have an address in a meaningful way. The nice thing is rent has only cost 3 to 6knt, so at least its cheap.
I look forward to a day the household registration dies a painful death and we of taiwan can move past our previous chinese shackles.
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Well as much as we like to, it isn’t going away anytime soon. There is no social or cultural will to do away with that. You ever wonder why some rundown house in Xinyi district is worth so much? It’s because of the houkou of being in the area! You know access to famous schools, etc.
And this is another reason why tenants can’t register. The landlord has half their family tied to it already. Adding a tenant would only complicate things. Even though it’s not supposed to be, probably 90% of Taipei has houkou in a city other than Taipei or New Taipei City.
The system exists in China as well, and it had nothing to do with CCP. That system was in place even before ROC was founded.
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Yes, that is exactly what i am agreeing with. and it is a retarded system at its core that should burn a fiery painfull death and never be heard from again. The system, in todays world, only enables corruption and oppression…thus, fuck that system. But i see no political, even social, will to change it so…I dont see it going away either, too much money to be made from it. Would be a good move away from China though and help solve some other issues such as real estate and voting…
It’s the same everywhere, especially the US. I’ve been around ppl who have small businesses in the US and there are dozens of way to lower or eliminate your taxes. And even most Fortune 500 companies don’t pay corporate taxes in the US, or pay barely anything. Trump paid like $750 last two years. And the IRS doesn’t even audit rich ppl anymore, you can only imagine the bullshit they are pulling
Ive claimed itemized over the years and haven’t heard anything from the landlords. Perhaps they will get slapped for tax evasion in the future or perhaps they are already on the up and up.
Many years ago I actually had a tax office that appeared to support landlord tax evasion. They insisted that to claim a deduction I had to bring the landlords ID card and chop to them first. A quick call to Taipei sorted them out quick.
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Well the US is actually an Oligarchy where they are slowly slipping towards Soviet style control. IRS audits normal people, not super rich anyways. They do this to look like they’re doing their job. Then you have social system designed to keep people dependent on them but not actually take care of them (like the abysmal healthcare system).
The IRS are not the same lol. And many other developed countries have better enforcement of their tax code.
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I suspect not at all, they just have to report the income for that year…
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Mr Wang, due to this oversight, please remit the correct amount at your convenience 
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Correct
I’m not really saying people don’t make 3 million NT a year. I said officially probably next to no one does. They’ll see to it that they appear to be poor on paper but in reality rich.
That top tax bracket is something every high earners try to avoid.