1. The essence of cross-border e-commerce
Cross-border e-commerce retail imports are an important supplement to general trade imports, allowing consumers to directly participate in international trade, improving consumption quality while simplifying and standardizing consumption processes, driving consumption reflux, and improving domestic consumer welfare. The original intention of the state to introduce relevant policies on cross-border e-commerce retail imports is to increase reasonable imports and give appropriate preferential tax policies to citizens’ personal consumption, which belongs to the specific tax reduction and exemption of the General Preference System. General preference means that every citizen in the country can enjoy cross-border e-commerce tax preferences.
Specific exemptions, first, mean that every citizen in the country must be within the single limit and annual limit to enjoy tax preferences, second, that the goods purchased must be included in the positive list management, and third, “personal use” and “no secondary sales”. Therefore, the principle of general preference is the starting point and goal of cross-border e-commerce retail imports. Authenticity and self-use are the regulatory requirements to ensure the real implementation of the principle of general preference. The purpose of cross-border e-commerce retail imports is to meet the needs of domestic consumers for overseas daily necessities, which is to benefit and facilitate consumers, rather than a channel for merchants to make illegal profits by using tax differences.
2. Online shopping bonded import model
Online shopping bonded import (BBC model, also known as bonded e-commerce) refers to cross-border e-commerce enterprises taking advantage of the customs special supervision area and bonded warehousing policy to transport the goods to be sold on the cross-border e-commerce trading platform into the special supervision area in advance. Once the customer places an order through the cross-border e-commerce trading platform, the goods can be quickly exported from the special supervision area. The cross-border e-commerce enterprise or logistics enterprise will go through customs clearance procedures in the customs bonded area, and the logistics enterprise will pack and deliver them to consumers. Before the goods are reported to the customs for export, the cross-border e-commerce enterprise, payment enterprise, and logistics enterprise will transmit the order, payment order and logistics order information to the customs through the cross-border e-commerce customs clearance service platform, and the customs will release them after comparing the “three orders”.
3. The essential characteristics of smuggling by brushing orders
(1) The perpetrator takes advantage of the tax preferential policy for cross-border e-commerce retail imports, and forges three orders to break down the relevant goods that should have been imported under general trade into small pieces and falsely report them as cross-border e-commerce retail imports. Therefore, the essence of “brushing orders” is smuggling by falsely reporting trade.
(2) The relevant goods should have been reported as ordinary goods for import under the general trade mode. In reality, the goods reported for import through the cross-border e-commerce retail commodity trade channel were sold as goods after entering the country.