Daunting Shadow Market in China by de facto Coin of Realm

NYT on 8/3 has an article to describe how rampant the false or forged receipts everywhere in China. You can buy it online and many employees use them regularly to "rightfully" increase their monthly compensation; executives (as in the recent scandal of British pharmaceutical GlaxoSithKline in China) use them to create slush fund to bribe officials; some companies even ask all employees to submit false receipts half the amount of their pay checks in order to reduce the company tax liability. Since NYT claims that you can buy receipts in 淘寶網 (www.taobao.com), I did try to check if it is true. Interestingly, if you type "购买发票", it will show "根据相关法律法规和政策，无法显示“购买发票”的相关宝贝". But if you type "购买发 票", you will get everything that you want. No wonder people always feel stupefied by the daunting amount of the so-called shadow market in China.

Coin of Realm in China Graft: Phony Receipts