August 13th saw an announcement on a government site that revealed that the China Aerospace science and industry corporation limited is turning to blockchain technology to improve and boost its electronic invoicing system. The report released by the country’s top and state newspaper daily, people’s daily, explains the role blockchain will play in helping to innovate supervision of invoices for taxation purposes countrywide. The post was made by the state administration of science, technology, and industry for national defense. According to the article on the daily, invoices totaling to about 1.31 billion electronic invoices were produced and circulated last year.
This annual figure of electronic invoices is expected to multiply to 54.55 billion by the year 2022 based on the annual growth rate of over 100 percent. China’s aerospace current electronic invoicing is end to end, covering aspects such as issuance, filing, reimbursements for Chinese taxpayers and authorities as well as inspection. To date, the state-owned Chinese aerospace entity has issued about 2.5 billion invoices according to the article. While the writers of the article recognize that that electronic invoicing has reached a stage of “comprehensive promotion and adoption”, they still hold that the current system faces serious challenges which include; false-reporting, over-reporting, and issues to do with traceability when it comes to the important process of invoice circulation.
The Chinese aerospace has now come up with an interesting system of blockchain electronic invoicing which allows for the authenticated and credible issuance of invoices, easily traceable invoice circulation as well as thoroughly efficient and cost-effective oversight by the country’s tax authorities. According to Shi Yan, an official of the CASIC, the institution opted to use blockchain technology in order to form an electronic bill chain that will be useful for third-party service platforms, supervision of the tax bureau, linking electronic bill data, circulation, status as well as social organization.
The representative speaking to the people’s daily also told of the ability of the blockchain to address the company’s as well as the entire industry’s points of difficulty in order to enable efficient and safe data sharing. Shin further revealed that the company was carrying out numerous tests of the blockchain based digital invoicing system. According to the official tests are currently underway in Beijing, Hubei, Shandong, Anhui, Ningxia as well as other locations. The system will receive an addition of 300,000 non-tax bills and invoices in order to help improve billings. Shenzhen, a Southeastern city in China has also been rolling out a blockchain invoicing system according to credible reports. Their system was reportedly developed by tech firm, Tencent, who are also the makers of WeChat, alongside the Shenzhen municipal taxation bureau.
