City clarifies business support measures

Shanghai will make sure of fast and full implementation of measures to support businesses during the fight against novel coronavirus pneumonia while people can check one-stop platforms for related information.

“During the past three days, the city has introduced 33 facilitating rules to clarify the 28 measures unveiled on Saturday that aim to support enterprises in need of help,” Ruan Qing, deputy director of the Shanghai Development and Reform Commission, said at a press conference on Tuesday.

“The measures, together with facilitating rules compiled by different government departments at all levels and documents to make rules better understood, can be found on four platforms for one-stop checks,” Ruan said.

To make sure of effective communication, the government will also send related information to more than 2 million phones of enterprise accounts and 10.25 million individual accounts, Ruan said.

The detailed measures are available on four official platforms of the government, but currently only in Chinese.

On Saturday, Shanghai released 28 measures to support local businesses, which pay close attention to those key enterprises working in prevention and control of the epidemic, as well as the hardest-hit industries and small and medium-sized enterprises.

And these most recent facilitating rules intend to make the measures easier to get understood and get implemented.

For example, the Shanghai Tax Service Administration has made detailed directions to guide businesses when they carry out a one-time pre-tax deduction for the purchase of equipment needed for manufacturing epidemic prevention materials, and there are answers to common questions concerning deduction of value-added tax and taxes of enterprise income, individual income, real estate and land use during the outbreak.