The long-awaited tax, which will replace the current administrative² penalties that are widely seen as ineffective, will be ushered³ in after the law behind it is finalized⁴.

 

The draft law is due to be submitted to the Standing⁵ Committee of the National People's Congress at the end of this year, after it is first made available to the public to solicit⁶ their views, Sun Youhai, director of the China Institute of Applied⁷ Jurisprudence of the Supreme⁸ People's Court, told Xinhua on Wednesday.

 

Sun said he learned the timetable from the Legislative⁹ Affairs Office of the State Council, which has been considering the draft law since receiving it in March 2013 from the Ministry¹⁰ of Finance (MOF), the State Administration of Taxation¹¹ and the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

 

Premier¹² Li Keqiang touched on the tax legislation in his government work report last Thursday.

 

Backed by comprehensive regulation and collected by taxation authorities, the tax will be more powerful in discouraging companies from polluting and will fuel investment in the green industry, experts believe.

 

Under the current system, environmental watchdogs are tasked with charging companies for pollution, but they have been ineffective in doing so.

 

In 2013, China should have levied¹³ pollutant¹⁴ discharge fees totaling 57.5 billion yuan (about 9.2 billion U.S. dollars), but less than 40 percent of the sum was collected, according to Jia Kang, former head of the Research Institute for Fiscal¹⁵ Science under the MOF.

 

Under the draft law, the tax will be levied based on emissions¹⁶ of sulfur¹⁷ dioxide, nitrogen oxides, dust and ammoniacal nitrogen, as well as chemical oxygen demand.

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