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Billion-dollar fake receipt scam: Four found guilty
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Sat, Feb 23, 2008
The Straits Times
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BEIJING - FOUR people were found guilty yesterday of printing and selling fake receipts - in China's biggest ever case of its kind, state media reported.
More than one million receipts worth 1.05 trillion yuan (about S$200 billion) had been churned out by a factory in south-western Guizhou province before police broke up the scam, Xinhua news agency said.
The receipts, along with equipment for printing them, were seized in separate raids over the past several months.
'It is the largest case of making and selling fake receipts since 1949, according to the Ministry of Public Security,' said Mr Chai Jiaping, deputy head of the Qujing public security bureau, in neighbouring Yunnan province, where the suspects stood trial.
| Yunnan police have arrested a fifth suspect who will stand trial in a separate case.
'The fake receipts that were confiscated could load two trucks,' reports said.
Beijing is engaged in a campaign to curb widespread tax evasion and fraud, in which the selling of forged receipts plays a significant role.
The fraud was uncovered when police found 128,300 fake receipts worth 18.7 million yuan on a coach heading from Guizhou to Yunnan last August.
This led police to search the house of consignor Yang Wenbin, where they found 72,700 fake receipts worth 36 million yuan, as well as computers and scanners for making the bogus receipts.
The police also discovered a workshop in Guizhou, where a further 400,000 receipts worth 611 billion yuan were found.
Two suspects and and another consignor, Luo Wenjie, were later caught in Yunnan's provincial capital Kunming, where fake receipts worth 192.5 billion yuan were seized.
Xinhua cited the head of the local tax bureau as saying the confiscated receipts would have dented national tax revenues by 75 billion yuan if sold and claimed as business expenses.
'The fake receipts look almost the same as the real ones. Consumers and even the tax collectors find it hard to distinguish between the genuine and fake ones,' said the official, Mr Tang Xiaozhou.
Mr Li Linjun, the state administration of taxation's spokesman, warned last month that there would be a crackdown on fake receipts this year.
Buoyed by double-digit economic growth, China's tax revenues have soared in recent years, growing by more than 30 per cent last year to over 4.9 trillion yuan.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, REUTERS
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