消費税法の執行と問題

抄録

Since our Consumption Tax (CT) Law took effect in 1989, six years have already passed. I am going to review the current state of CT execution, and point out some results and legal issues. I will exemplify some of the realities of Japanese CT through such reviews.
From the annual statistical tax reports edited by the National Tax Administrative Agency (Kokuzei-cho), we can learn some interesting facts about CT execution, such as the third biggest source of tax revenue from a fiscal device levied at 3 percent; sharp increase in tax delinquency; the small proportion of administrative tax claims for relief and tax suits compared with tax complaints in the CT, and so on.
We have relatively few judicial cases on CT. In all these cases, taxpayers/consumers were lost. In some cases, consumers sued sellers who passed on the full burden of tax to the consumers while themselves receiving special CT dispensations. This is a significant feature of CT suits as compared to other tax suits.
As for specific problems concerning CT, I will refer to its regressiveness, benefits taxpayers receive from special treatments, and refusal by the tax agency to recognize CT credits equivalent to all the CT paid in preprocess.
Finally, I wil stress that people must know the real nature and practical issues of CT despite their positions either for or against it, and discuss how to deal with CT in the future.