City tax authorities will begin issuing payment certificates to individual taxpayers starting next month, in an attempt to protect their legal rights.

The certificates will guarantee employees know how much tax their employers have paid on their behalf, preventing companies from deducting taxes from wages without paying to the government.

To begin with, tax authorities will send out the certificates once a year, but they plan to send them out every six months in the future, the Shanghai Taxation Bureau said in a statement released yesterday. "We will try to hand out the certificates upon requests from individual taxpayers immediately after they pay taxes."

Currently, the tax bureau only sends tax receipts to companies, who deduct tax payments from employees' monthly wages and pass them on to the bureau.

The plan doesn't cover expatriates working in the city, but they can ask their employers to help them get a tax certificate from the bureau.

To protect the financial privacy of taxpayers, the bureau will seal the certificates in an envelop, which will then be delivered to employers to hand out to workers.

"We will start to mail the certificates directly to the taxpayers later," the bureau said. If a company fails to pay taxes for its workers, the employees can be held responsible for paying back taxes.

(Shanghai Daily June 8, 2005)