The Great fa piao Quest

The British employer for whom I've been doing all the presentations lately likes to avoid the bother of having to pay income tax for its small army of casual workers like myself by offsetting our fees against tax-deductible expenses. And almost everything is deductible in China: food, travel, even utilities bills and rent. Because of this, there is a huge black market in secondhand (or sometimes, no doubt, faked) receipts - or fa piao ('tax tickets') as they are known in the local lingo. They change hands for a small percentage of their face value, and there are usually touts buying and selling them outside the major train, bus, and subway stations.

Unfortunately, the British education company claims to be limited in the types of fa piao it can submit - food and transport only. Bit of a bummer for me, since I've just put a 1,000 RMB top-up on the chargecard for my electricity meter and was hoping I'd be able to submit the receipt for that.

They also claim (and I have no idea if this is really an official regulation, or just them playing silly buggers) that now that we have moved into the new financial year in April, the Beijing Tax Office is only accepting fa piao with a 2008 date. Really? Not for the whole of the preceding tax year?? It seems incredible to me, bafflingly perverse - even by the standards of PFU-ness we come to expect in China. But that's my employers' story, and they're sticking to it. I even got caught out on this with my fees for last month, because they weren't submitting their tax claim on them until this month. Damn!

This is a huge pain-in-the-arse. I have several thousand RMB worth of fa piao from 2007 (mostly taxi receipts), but hardly any from the first three months of this year (when I wasn't working much, and only going out in my local neighbourhood: my taxi usage had dropped off by about 70 or 80%). I have had to call around all my friends, cadging spare fa piao wherever I can.

This month, I have been using taxis far more (and remembering to keep all of the receipts, something I'd got a bit sloppy about in recent months), and making myself unpopular with restaurant owners by demanding fa piao whenever I eat out (most fa piao - the higher value ones, at any rate - have to be dated and made out to a specific payor; restaurants, however, usually have blank vouchers for their fa piao: undated, anonymous, limitlessly exchangeable! Unfortunately, this means that they're so valuable, the bosses never want to just give them away to people who merely happen to have spent a lot of money in their restaurant; no, you have to ask for them specially - and often quite forcefully and repeatedly.). Alas, I stand to earn some 3,000 or so RMB through this employer this month, and I am nowhere near to amassing enough fa piao to cover a sum like that.

I fear I am going to have to start transacting with the dodgy touts down at the railway station.....