In the field of consumption tax, the production of taxable consumer goods is a taxable activity, while pure trading activities are not within the scope of taxation and naturally do not require the payment of consumption tax. However, a refining and chemical enterprise received a notice from its competent tax authority requiring it to pay back taxes on the sale of purchased naphtha raw materials. Is there a legal basis for the tax authority to do so? Should the refining and chemical enterprise pay consumption tax on its trading business of purchasing and selling naphtha? This article intends to analyze this issue.

After the refined oil products module went online, new behavioral patterns of false invoicing in the petrochemical industry have emerged, and red-flush false invoicing is one of them. In practice, some judicial authorities have dealt with red-flush false invoicing of refined oil products as the crime of false invoicing, but this does not accurately grasp the true nature of this type of behavior. The author will take the two declaration forms as the key hand to prove that the essence of the behavior of red-flush false invoicing is to sell the inventory data of refined oil products in order to evade the consumption tax, so as to help the judicial authorities to correctly convict the behavior on the basis of correctly exploring the essence of the behavior, so as to provide the practical judicial protection for the only legal interest of the national consumption tax interests that are infringed upon in this kind of cases.

The Interpretation of the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law to the Handling of Criminal Cases of Endangering the Administration of Tax Levies (Legal Interpretation [2024] No. 4) makes it clear that false invoicing that does not aim at fraudulently offsetting the taxes and does not result in a fraudulently lost tax due to the offsetting does not constitute the offence of falsely invoicing for value-added tax. Accordingly, it can be seen that the legal interests protected by the offence of false invoicing of VAT specifically refers to the VAT collected and managed by way of credit, and this conclusion is not created by the judicial interpretation of the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate, but is the original meaning of the criminal law, which is also applicable before the implementation of the judicial interpretation of the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate. Tax-related cases in the petrochemical industry mainly infringed upon the interests of consumption tax, and the perpetrators usually did not have the purpose of fraudulently offsetting VAT, nor did they have the possibility of causing VAT losses. However, in the past, in the trial of petrochemical tax-related cases, many courts did not make appropriate purposeful interpretations of the criminal law, and did not accurately determine the tax interests infringed upon by petrochemical tax-related cases, which led to a large number of such cases being convicted of the offence of fraudulently opening VAT special invoices. We are of the view that cases in the petrochemical industry that have been convicted of false invoicing have been incorrectly identified as facts and incorrectly applying the law, and that appeals can still be actively filed.

Since 2022, various regions have successively carried out rigorous remediation of fuel dispenser cheating behavior, and some regions have achieved results. Recently, Zhejiang Province Market Supervision Administration summarized the effectiveness of the inspection since the launch of the special governance action of fuel dispenser measurement accuracy in March this year, and released the top ten typical cases of this special governance. Among them, shaoxing zhuji investigated and dealt with a cheating gasoline dispenser oil sales case, the party in August 2022 from others to buy an illegal modification can be cheated through the instrument to control the actual amount of fuel dispenser, as of the time of seizure, the party has been the use of the above gasoline dispenser sales of diesel fuel more than 15 tons, the amount of money involved in the case amounted to more than 100,000 yuan. Because of the large amount of money involved, Zhuji City Bureau of this case is suspected of constituting a crime of fraud according to the law transferred to the public security organs to deal with. It can be seen that cheating on gasoline dispensers not only involves tax evasion, but may also be suspected of other crimes.

In recent years, the petrochemical enterprises to change the invoice suspected of false billing criminal cases continue to break out across the country, the judicial processing and refereeing results around the world are different, and the practical world is very controversial. The core of the dispute is whether changing the invoice name of "heavy oil", "crude oil", "residual oil" and other types of component oils to "fuel oil" and then using it to offset consumption tax constitutes a violation of the law. After the invoice name of "heavy oil", "crude oil", "residual oil" and other types of component oils was changed to "fuel oil", the act of using the invoice name for false offsetting of consumption tax constituted a tax evasion crime or a false VAT invoice crime. The core of solving this controversial issue is to clarify the essential difference between the crime of false invoicing and the crime of tax evasion. The author starts from a case of a petrochemical enterprise in Hainan Province that changed its invoices.

Recently, seventeen energy companies in Shanxi Province have been investigated for allegedly falsely issuing VAT invoices, with a cumulative total of about 1.8 billion yuan of falsely issued VAT sales invoices to the outside world, and were confirmed to be on the run (out of contact) after inspection by the tax authorities. The tax authorities have issued a Decision on Tax Treatment and transferred them to the judicial authorities in accordance with the law. This matter may trigger a large-scale investigation of hundreds of invoiced enterprises, and the potential administrative risk and criminal risk will be transformed into reality. Then, after the competent tax authorities of the invoiced enterprises receive the Letter of Concurrence on Tax Violation Cases to start the inspection procedure or the public security authorities receive the criminal case, how should the invoiced enterprises respond?

In recent period, some stabilized light hydrocarbon producers around the world have been subjected to tax inspections and required to pay huge amounts of consumption tax on their stabilized light hydrocarbon products. China's consumption tax policy on refined oil products is relatively complex, and there are differences in the understanding of the relevant policies between tax enterprises and the two sides. In particular, there is a big controversy in practice as to whether stabilized light hydrocarbons and other ancillary products of the petrochemical industry should be included in the scope of naphtha excise tax levy. This paper analyzes whether stabilized light hydrocarbons belong to naphtha and whether consumption tax should be levied on them from the perspectives of production process, nature and application of stabilized light hydrocarbons, combined with recent typical cases.

Recently, Zhejiang Provincial Tax Bureau issued a batch of tax processing decisions. Among them, the case of a gang controlling a shell company to falsely issue VAT invoices deserves attention. The case belongs to the invoicing mode of "distribution circulation", and the enterprise involved in the case has falsely issued nearly 700 million, and after the Jinhua Intermediate Court made a judgment on the false invoicing behavior, the First Inspection Bureau of Zhoushan City Taxation Bureau of the State Administration of Taxation made a tax processing decision on the false invoicing behavior, and ordered the enterprise involved in the case to make accounting adjustments within a certain period of time. This paper intends to analyze the procedural legitimacy of this case in the interface between tax administrative law enforcement and criminal justice on the basis of sorting out the facts of the case.