Experts at a forum at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei yesterday called for more consistent allocation of resources between municipalities to avoid “making the rich richer and the poor poorer.”
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) and other lawmakers convened the discussion to address unequal resource distribution, an issue that has risen to the foreground amid calls to merge Hsinchu city and county into a special municipality.
Many experts at the meeting suggested amending the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) to address the issue.
Photo: Hsieh Chun-lin, Taipei Times
The law was last amended in 1999, National Taiwan University College of Law professor Ko Ke-chung (柯格鐘) said.
This latest amendment changed the business tax into a federal tax, sapping income from local governments, he said.
Funding should be allocated according to administrative need, but the allocation act and the Local Government Act (地方制度法) do not refer to each other, he added.
Both acts should be amended and combined to ensure that local affairs have the funding they need, Ko said.
The top five sources of tax revenue are all federal taxes, benefiting the central government’s budget, he said.
Counties are at the greatest disadvantage, as they must divide up whatever little revenue they have with the districts under their jurisdiction, Ko said, adding that a particularly egregious regulation excludes counties as recipients of estate tax revenue.
Hu Po-yen (胡博硯), a professor at Soochow University’s School of Law, said that after more than 20 years, it is no wonder that an equity issue as emerged.
Tax revenue is one of the main sources of income for local governments, Hu said, adding that the allocation formula should be reconsidered along with the separation between special municipalities and other jurisdictions.
County and city governments ostensibly have autonomy, but in reality, their hands are tied, Soochow University Department of Political Science associate professor Tim Chen (陳立剛) said.
“It is shameful they have to go begging to the central government,” he said.
As power is no longer as centralized as it once was, the pertinent laws should be amended to reflect that, he added.
He therefore recommended that the allocation law be amended to give more tax revenue to local governments, to standardize amounts allocated to different types of local governments and to allow special budgets for collaborative programs.
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