Recently, five departments, including the State Administration for Market Regulation ("SAMR"), have jointly issued the Circular on Advancing the Work on Providing Convenience for Enterprise Deregistration (the "Circular").
The Circular clearly states that, all relevant departments shall achieve objectives set for shortening the list of required documents and optimizing business processes, by March 1, 2019, to enhance the efficiency in the enterprise deregistration process; by September 1, 2019, all regions are required to realize their goals in respect of the establishment of a specific online service module for enterprise deregistration, making it possible to deregister an enterprise on one network. Further, the Circular outlines six major tasks and measures which include "improving information sharing and business cooperation and promoting one-network services for enterprise deregistration", "reforming the enterprise deregistration system by simplifying enterprise deregistration process and shortening the list of required documents" and "advocating the practice of handling tax deregistration differently under different circumstances to expediate the tax settlement process". Among others, the Circular states that tax authorities will allow the exemption of certain tax settlement formalities. More specifically, a taxpayer may directly apply to the market regulator for deregistering itself under the simplified method and does not have to carry out formalities with the tax authority for tax settlement, provided that it has never handled tax-related affairs, or it has handled tax-related affairs but not yet claimed invoices and does not owe any tax (including overdue fines) or penalties.