Fee Web Daunting In China Charges Cover Everything From Flowers To Dredging
In a city of bureaucrats hungry for revenue, McDonald’s isn’t just for hamburgers.
Its 38 restaurants in Beijing must pay for family planning, flowers for city streets and river dredging in a city with one small river.
A list of 31 such fees - charged on top of taxes - costs each McDonald’s thousands of dollars a year, according to an official report made public this month.
Mayor Jia Qinglin ordered the report, focusing on McDonald’s, to find out why foreign investment in Beijing had stagnated, the Chinese Economic Times newspaper said.
The report concludes most of the fees were unauthorized - but were not corruption. Agencies simply are being forced to raise their own revenues in the face of government funding cuts, it says.
The report highlights complaints by foreign investors that they frequently are targets for fees and taxes imposed without warning or explanation.
“Some fees are reasonable … and some fees for foreign businesses defy understanding,” said the Economic Times in an article on the report.
Foreign firms aren’t the only ones hit by unusual fees. The Communist Party called on local officials in July to stop collecting unauthorized fees from state-owned companies.
As of last week, 21 provinces and cities had canceled 2,877 fees.