The Shanghai Free Trade Zone implements an array of innovative measures to help foreign trade enterprises resume production. [Photo by Wang Xiang/Xinhua]

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, tax departments in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone (FTZ) have been implementing a wide array of innovative measures to improve the management of export tax rebates in order to help foreign trade enterprises resume production, local media reported on April 22.

"Tax authorities have been working around the clock to handle drawback procedures for foreign trade firms, cutting processing time to an average of 2.94 days," said an official from the zone's tax department.

Tax authorities have processed 8.99 billion yuan ($1.27 billion) in export rebates for 6,616 companies this year.

In recent years, tax departments in the zone have introduced a number of reform measures, including paperless export rebate services and a single-window administrative system, saving much time for applicants.

The paperless reform for export rebates has also improved the operational efficiency of tax departments, cutting down on the financial costs of enterprises, and early work on paperless export rebate services started on January 2017 in the zone.

Additionally, the zone has established a single-window administrative system to help facilitate international trade. The idea is to provide business entities with access to a full range of resources and standardized services from various government departments through a single portal.

"The single-window system has greatly eased our workload, and it now takes us just a few minutes to handle tax rebates," said a manager of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, a leading Chinese chip manufacturer.

The single-window service was first promoted in Pudong New District and later rolled out nationwide in 2019. It has made government services more efficient and optimized the local business environment.