Weaponizing Audits
Last month several figures in Hong Kong’s media spoke out about an apparent new tactic being used to curtail the activities of independent media and journalists. Since November 2023, at least six outlets and around twenty journalists have faced tax audits spanning seven years, with demands totaling over HK$1.7 million, or more than 200,000 dollars. The targeted outlets include InMedia (獨立媒體), The Witness (法庭線), ReNews, Boomhead, Hong Kong Peanuts (香港花生), and the Hong Kong Free Press.
Tax authorities made errors and “strange, unreasonable claims,” including auditing one outlet for a year before it was established and asking a journalist to pay profits tax for a nonexistent company registration number. Inspections also extend to family members, including both parents of journalists’ association chief Selina Cheng (鄭嘉如). Hong Kong Peanuts host To Kwan-hang (陶君行) revealed that virtually all hosts, including Wong Ho-ming (黃浩銘) and Chow Ka-fat (周嘉發), received audit demands.
While the Inland Revenue Department (IRD), the territory’s tax collection authority, maintains that the “industry or background of a taxpayer has no bearing on such reviews,” the unified actions appear to be a form of bureaucratic censorship designed to exhaust the operations of independent media. Similar tactics have been used by authoritarian governments in Russia and Turkey, where punitive tax audits and financial sanctions have sought to control press activities. The approach would mark a new development in Hong Kong’s media landscape.
For many in the Hong Kong indie media space, the IRD’s insistence that they were “randomly selected” for a probe is difficult to swallow. “I can count all of Hong Kong’s non-government aligned digital media outlets on two hands,” Hong Kong Free Press founder Tom Grundy told Lingua Sinica. “Most are under tax audit simultaneously.” Grundy emphasizes that his outlet has insisted throughout its ten-year history on “meticulous record-keeping,” but notes that handling the audit “has diverted resources, manpower and funds away from journalism.”
The IRD audit of the Hong Kong Free Press comes one year after the outlet was selected — “randomly,” it was told — for a rare inspection from the Companies Registry, the city’s official business registration and company records authority. “We’re so lucky, perhaps we should put some numbers on the lottery,” Grundy said.
