Which authority collects social security contributions

In large countries, the United States, Britain and other countries by the tax department, while France, Germany and other countries by the social security authorities or independent organizations responsible for the collection. Each country's choice is based on their own national conditions and historical factors made, so our country on this issue must also be combined with their own national conditions to make a choice. In the author's view, China should have two starting points when considering the collection agency of social insurance premiums: first, it should be conducive to ensuring the collection; second, it should be conducive to saving the collection costs and improving the efficiency of collection and management. The collection of social insurance premiums by the tax department has the advantages of these two aspects. First of all, the tax department is responsible for the collection of social insurance premiums in the system and technology is an absolute advantage. Because the social insurance premiums are levied on the total wages of enterprises according to a certain percentage, and the tax department needs to grasp the wage payment situation of enterprises in the process of levying enterprise income tax and individual income tax, so the tax department has a certain comparative advantage in the collection of social insurance premiums. For example, the Enterprise Income Tax Law stipulates that the wages and salaries paid by the enterprises can be deducted before tax, so that the enterprises have to truthfully declare the salary payment situation of the current year to the tax authorities during the tax declaration, and if the enterprises conceal the total wages of the employees for the purpose of underpayment of social insurance premiums, then this behavior will be easily detected by the tax authorities. In addition, the Individual Income Tax Law also requires enterprises and units to withhold and pay individual income tax on behalf of their employees when they pay wages to them, and they have the obligation to declare the full amount of their employees' income to the tax authorities, which also requires the tax authorities to comprehensively and accurately grasp the situation of wage and salary payment of the enterprises and units, which is conducive for the tax authorities to collect the social insurance premiums. Secondly, the tax authorities have a professional collection team (including collection and inspection personnel), the size and quality of which are sufficiently large and qualified for the task of collecting social insurance premiums. Especially in recent years, the State has implemented the Golden Tax Project, which has greatly improved the level of informatization of the tax authorities. If all social insurance premiums are handed over to social security agencies for collection, the latter will inevitably have to "start another stove" and set up a large collection team, which will obviously increase the cost of collecting social insurance premiums from the state's point of view. Moreover, many regional social security agencies do not have advanced information-based collection and management systems, and if they take on the important task of collecting social security fees, they are bound to build another set of information-based collection and management systems, and this kind of duplicated construction is bound to result in a huge waste. As a matter of fact, there are not a few countries where all the taxes and fees of the government are handed over to a single department for collection. In these countries, the tax bureaus are not called "tax bureaus" but "revenue bureaus". For example, in the United States, it is called the Internal Revenue Service; in Canada, it is called the Canadian Revenue Agency; and in the United Kingdom, it is called the Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs Service. This kind of institutional arrangement is considered entirely from the perspective of institutional set-up and collection efficiency. This institutional arrangement is worthy of our reference. In fact, at present, our tax authorities are also responsible for a certain number of fees and charges, such as education surcharges, urban construction fees, cultural utility fees, and so on, all of which are levied and collected by the tax authorities. This arrangement is very reasonable because there is no need for the education surcharge to be collected by the education department and the cultural utility fee to be collected by the cultural department. In the long run, our tax authorities should also develop in the direction of the National Revenue Authority.