The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and three other authorities have recently released the Circular on Effectively Performing the Key Tasks for Reducing Costs in 2024 (the "Circular").
The Circular covers 22 tasks in seven areas, which include enhancing the effectiveness of tax and fee preferential policies, improving the quality and efficiency of financial services for the real economy, and continuously reducing institutional transaction costs. The Circular emphasizes the need to reinforce oversight on fees and charges related to businesses and to decisively investigate and punish illicit charges, fines, and levies. Specially targeting government bodies and their affiliates, industry associations, financial institutions, natural gas pipeline networks and water supply enterprises, it aims to investigate and rectify violations such as unauthorized fees in intermediary services for administrative examination and approval, illegal charges by industry associations leveraging administrative powers, failure of financial institutions to implement fee reduction and exemption policies, and non-compliance of natural gas pipeline networks and water supply enterprises with government-set pricing. The Circular also calls for the creation of a fair and competitive market environment, by formulating opinions on improving market access systems, revising a new negative list for market access, and promoting full coverage of market access performance evaluation. It also emphasizes ongoing efforts to conduct special anti-monopoly law enforcement actions in the livelihood sector and to bolster anti-monopoly supervision and law enforcement in key areas.