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Fake CSPs in focus of crackdown, 2022 pharma firms face tax risks head-on

Nov. 22, 2023, 5:42 p.m.
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On April 27, 2021, nine departments, including the National Health Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, jointly issued the Circular on the Issuance of Working Points for Correcting Unethical Practices in the Field of Pharmaceutical Purchase and Sales and in Medical Services in 2021, which is concerned about the prominent problems in the health industry, such as "kickbacks," "red packets," "black clinics," "false billing and tax evasion," and other issues. The Circular is concerned about the prominent problems of "kickbacks", "red packets", "black clinics", and "tax evasion" in the healthcare sector. During the two sessions of this year, "medical reform", "drugs continue to reduce prices" and other hot issues in the pharmaceutical industry ranked at the forefront of netizens' concerns. However, the pharmaceutical industry "with gold sales" mode does not change, the above problems can not be cured, which tax-related problems are still prominent. 2022 false CSP, illegal intermediaries and other key to combat, pharmaceutical enterprises will face tax risks, in this context, pharmaceutical enterprises should pay attention to what risk outbreaks and how to properly respond, this article will share with readers the latest information on the pharmaceutical industry, and the latest information on the pharmaceutical industry. In this context, pharmaceutical enterprises should pay attention to which risk outbreaks and how to deal with them properly, this article will share with readers.

I. false individual, illegal intermediaries become the focus of investigation and handling, pharmaceutical enterprises cash risk increased

In recent years, with the "4+7" centralized purchasing with quantity, "two-invoice system" and other reform measures continue to land, the pharmaceutical industry's previous multi-level distribution model can no longer be sustained, and a large number of pharmaceutical sales companies have transformed into CSO, CSP, CMO, CRO and other outsourcing service providers. The company has been in the process of developing a new service provider. However, subject to the established mode of product sales and benefit distribution, the problem of commercial kickbacks and bribery in the pharmaceutical industry has not been eradicated, and the emergence of new forms of the Internet has provided new possibilities for pharmaceutical enterprises to extract profits, resulting in the pharmaceutical industry presenting the phenomenon of coexistence of false driving and commercial bribery, and the cases of false driving and bribery are implicated in each other.In the middle of 2018, the State Administration of Taxation in Hubei Province issued the "State Administration of Taxation". Hubei Provincial Taxation Bureau on the Special Risk Response Work in the Pharmaceutical Consulting Industry" (E Tax Office Letter [2018] No. 11), which carried out a special risk response inspection of the province's pharmaceutical consulting industry, and a large number of small-sized consulting centers with false invoices for pharmaceutical enterprises surfaced, and most of these small-sized consulting centers were characterized as "false individual households without real business, individual solos These small-scale consulting centers are mostly characterized as "false individual households and individual alone without real business", and the relevant responsible persons are held administrative and criminal liabilities. There is no lack of professional tax intermediaries and platforms in this fiasco, and certain Internet tax platforms are also involved in this case. From 2019 to the end of 2021, the tax department exposed a number of "black intermediary" tax-related illegal cases, which helped the relevant pharmaceutical representatives, recreational personnel, false invoicing, the establishment of "shell" enterprises to avoid payment of taxes, and profit from it.

In fact, the core of the operation of pharmaceutical enterprises to realize low-cost cash through intermediaries and small-scale taxpayers lies in the financial rebates made by local governments to intermediary platforms and small-scale taxpayers or the approved levies implemented by local tax authorities on small-scale taxpayers, which is known as the "tax depression". This is also many high-income people to avoid tax "secret sauce". However, from this year onwards, in the false individual, illegal intermediaries into the focus of investigation and handling at the same time, the tax puddle policy is also facing a gradual cleanup, or difficult to find.2021 December 22 Auditor General Hou Kai was commissioned by the State Council to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress reported to the 2020 annual audit of the implementation of the central budget and other financial revenues and expenditures of the Central Committee to rectify the problem. Among them, for the issue of "illegal tax return causing loss of fiscal revenue, 15 provinces and cities returned 23.873 billion yuan of tax in the name of financial incentives, and most of the return ratio was more than 90% of the local share of revenue", it was proposed that "11 provinces cleaned up and repealed the tax return policy that did not comply with the regulations, standardized the management of fiscal expenditure, and so on. 11 provinces cleaned up and abolished non-compliant tax rebate policies and documents, standardized financial expenditure management, and formulated and revised 11 relevant systems." Visible, "tax puddle" is about to become history, in the false individual, illegal intermediary has become the focus of investigation and handling of the background, drug companies will undoubtedly intensify the risk of cash.

II. the Audit Commission named tax-related issues, a variety of means of tax evasion was exposed

On June 7, 2021, the Auditor General of the Audit Commission seriously pointed out in the "Report of the State Council on the Audit of the Central Budget Execution and Other Financial Income and Expenditures for the Year 2020" that in the medical field, "the pattern of cheating and evasion is new" and that "8,780 fixed-point medical institutions, intermediary institutions and insured persons are suspected of cheating and evading 1.059 billion yuan from the fund. personnel are suspected of cheating and siphoning off 1.059 billion yuan from the fund. Compared with the previous single means of reimbursement through false prescribing of medicines, the current means are more covert and the carriers are more diverse. The first is to falsely prescribe items that are difficult to verify in the diagnosis and treatment records. Tui na, acupuncture, etc., because they do not require consumables or lack of measurement standards, etc., by some fixed-point medical institutions, a large number of false prescription in order to increase the settlement base. Secondly, the illegal intermediary collusion group insurance fraud. Some unscrupulous intermediaries take advantage of the fixed-point medical institutions more settlement, more reimbursement of the interests of the insured convergence, from which collusion to promote to earn fees to achieve a 'win-win-win'." This report disclosed the existence of the medical field of false billing fraud health insurance fund chaos.

Of course the problem is not only here. The Audit Report suggests that a total of nine cases of tax evasion and other problematic clues were found, involving more than 1.8 billion yuan. Most of them occurred in the areas of automobile sales, procurement of agricultural products, and payment of personal taxes by high-income groups. Some enterprises joined forces across provinces and falsely issued a large number of invoices to offset taxes in a short period of time through fictitious business and collusive pricing, etc. and wrote them off immediately; some high-income earners maliciously ceded and transferred their assets to evade payment of a high amount of personal tax. In this context, July 19, 2021 - July 28, the State Administration of Taxation organized a tax key work supervision, Tianjin, Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi, Shandong, Henan, Hunan, Guangxi, Hainan, Chongqing, Guizhou, Gansu, Dalian, Ningbo, Xiamen, Qinghai and other provinces (districts, municipalities) tax bureaus to carry out on-site inspections, a new round of tax-related audit storm again.

So, in this storm of audit, the tax authorities are concerned about what aspects of the pharmaceutical enterprises? Or what aspects or cause tax authorities to focus on? I inquired that the Shenyang Office of the Audit Commission for the characteristics of false invoicing of pharmaceutical enterprises, summarized the key points of the audit and the way of the audit, and wrote an article published in the Audit Observer magazine in charge of the Audit Commission, pointing out that: to understand the characteristics of the false VAT invoices of pharmaceutical enterprises, you can determine the key points and lock the target in a targeted manner during the audit. Audit points include:

(I) Analyzing the financial statements and operating statements of enterprises. Investigate the medicine distribution enterprise financial statements of the difference between the price of drugs (the difference between the income and cost of drug distribution), the enterprise drug supply and marketing inventory business statement of the difference between the price of drugs, analyze the difference between the two amount, the reason; investigation of the enterprise's financial account sales gross profit, the enterprise drug supply and marketing inventory business sales gross profit, analyze the existence of the enterprise inflated costs, hiding the situation of the profit of the drug distribution.

(II) Comparing the enterprise's VAT special invoice import and sales certification and the drug supply, sales and inventory business system inventory. Correlate the data of the above systems and make group inquiries according to the invoicing party (supplier) to check whether the invoicing party (supplier) in the VAT invoice authentication data is actually selling medicines. If the invoicing party (supplier) does not appear in the inventory data of the drug supply and marketing inventory system, it can be concluded that there is false invoicing suspicion between the two parties; if the amount of drugs sold by the invoicing party (supplier) is greater than the actual amount of drugs purchased by the enterprise into the inventory, then it is necessary to further investigate the purchase and sale of drugs and check whether there is any false purchase of the business situation.

(III) Checking the VAT invoices recorded by the enterprise. When it is determined that a pharmaceutical distribution enterprise has the suspicion of false invoicing, the auditors directly check the VAT invoices of both the purchase and sale of drugs is one of the effective and convenient means to characterize the problem. In the certification process of VAT special invoices, the State Tax Department only certifies the selling (purchasing) enterprise, taxpayer identification number, invoice code, invoice number, amount, tax amount and invoicing date in several basic fields. Since the commodity information corresponding to the sales list is not included in the deduction authentication system, it provides criminal conditions for enterprises to falsely issue VAT invoices by forging sales lists. In this regard, auditors can find problems by carefully checking the sales lists of VAT invoices of both purchasers and sellers and checking whether the contents of drugs in the lists are consistent.

(IV) Verifying the sales of medicines by enterprises and the procurement of medicines by medical institutions. When a pharmaceutical distribution enterprise fraudulently or illegally purchases VAT invoices falsely issued to a medical institution, the enterprise's pharmaceutical sales data and recorded invoices are inconsistent with those of the medical institution, and problems can be detected by comparing the sales (purchasing) data of the two parties or comparing the invoices. In addition, in order to hide the drug distribution profiteering, to avoid paying taxes, the enterprise VAT general invoice sales certification amount is generally smaller than the real business, check the certification data whether there is a "small amount" of invoicing or "small invoicing accounted for a large proportion of" and other characteristics can also be locked suspects.

The author suggests that pharmaceutical companies can refer to the above focus on self-check.

III. the Internet finance and taxation platform frequent mine, capital flow back into the main fuse

With the development of the digital economy and platform economy, a number of Internet finance and taxation platforms have emerged to provide enterprises with comprehensive finance and taxation services such as "payroll and remuneration", "tax planning for non-voucher business" and "self-employment". "However, as the State Administration of Taxation (SAT) has organized a number of tax services for enterprises, it is not possible to provide them with comprehensive tax services. However, with the exposure of a group of tax-related illegal "black intermediaries" by the State Administration of Taxation, the authenticity and legitimacy of the business of some Internet taxation platforms have been questioned. Originally, after the implementation of the "two-invoice system", the invoicing company disappeared, but a large number of companies with titles such as "consulting and management services", "pharmaceutical science and technology consulting", "information technology" and so on. Information technology" and other titles of the emergence of third-party service companies, these third-party service companies are generally registered for the original pharmaceutical distributors set up a distributor to use more than one identity document to register a number of companies, continue to "two-ticket system" after the implementation of the pharmaceutical production and distribution enterprises to provide price increase services, the use of financial After the implementation of the "two-invoice system", the dealer continues to provide price-added services for pharmaceutical production and distribution enterprises, and utilizes the financial rebate policy to falsely issue special invoices or general invoices for the distribution companies under his actual control or for pharmaceutical enterprises, which has led to the outbreak of a series of administrative and criminal cases.

The rise of networked financial and tax platforms has provided pharmaceutical enterprises with a superficial means of risk avoidance and transfer, but the risk still exists objectively and is implicated by the platforms to pharmaceutical enterprises.2022 On March 4, 2012, the news that a business center rumored to be a platform of a township government had been subjected to administrative penalties for falsely issuing general invoices for service promotion fees and conference fees for a number of pharmaceutical enterprises aroused social concern, reflecting the difficulties in clarifying the relationship between pharmaceutical enterprises and local governments. local governments, reflecting the difficult to clarify the boundaries of interests between drug enterprises and local governments, as well as the modus operandi and motivation of drug enterprises to cash in on fraudulent invoicing.

This tax penalty instrument reflects the fact that the return of funds has become a key clue in the investigation and handling of false invoicing. Under the background of the construction of the fourth phase of the Golden Tax Project and the strengthening of capital supervision by banks, the large and frequent transactions between public and private households and between private households have become the target of automatic supervision, in which the clues of suspected reflows are constantly transmitted to the tax authorities by the banking institutions, which provide the clues and basis for the further investigation and judgment of the tax authorities.

At present, China's tax collection and management has begun to enter the informatization stage, completed the construction of the third phase of the Golden Tax Project, and is taking the reform of electronic invoicing in all fields, links and elements as a breakthrough, launching the implementation of the fourth phase of the Golden Tax Project, continuing to expand the resources of tax big data, and promoting the internal and external tax-related data convergence and connection, and the organic connection of online and offline data. The data are organically connected. It can be said that China's tax collection and management has gone through two periods of "experience management of tax" and "vote management of tax", and is moving towards the period of "tax management by numbers", and the in-depth application of big data will surely bring about a significant improvement in the effectiveness of tax collection and management. The deep application of big data will surely bring about a significant increase in the effectiveness of tax collection and management. Under these indications, pharmaceutical enterprises must take business authenticity as the first priority when utilizing the Internet finance and tax platform, and take fund transactions and business evidence chain as the object and focus of self-checking, so as to legally pay the relevant remuneration to pharmaceutical representatives and outsiders.

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