People come to declare and pay taxes in Hanoi. (Photo: baochinhphu.vn) At a recent meeting on implementation plans and proposals for specificsolutions to prevent tax loss for e-commerce activities, Director General ofthe General Department of Taxation (GDT) Mai Xuan Thanh said that the boomingdevelopment along with many new forms of e-commerce in recent years has posednew challenges for tax management authorities. That is the ability to fullymanage revenue sources, determine taxpayers and tax bases, clearly classifytypes of income as a basis for taxation, and control business transactions tomanage tax collection subjects and cash flow control.
Thanh said that the Ministry of Finance has approved a tax management projectfor e-commerce activities in Vietnam in an effort to strengthen the managementof e-commerce activities and business activities on digital platforms.Accordingly, the GDT has developed, proposed and implemented tax managementsolutions in the short and long term to improve the efficiency of tax managementfor e-commerce activities.
“Besides the results achieved, Thanh said, tax management of e-commercebusiness activities is still limited. The requirement is for tax authorities toreview the actual tax management in localities to come up with solutions tomanage tax collection with e-commerce more strongly in the coming time.”
Also at this meeting, GDT Deputy Director Mai Son said that to effectivelycollect taxes on e-commerce, specialised units need to focus on unifying theidentification of subjects participating in e-commerce business, therebyproposing specific solutions for each target group.
According to Son, regarding tax management methods of collecting informationthrough entities related to e-commerce business activities, such as owners ofe-commerce trading floors, foreign suppliers with no business establishments inVietnam, shipping units and payment intermediaries, need special research tohave implementation solutions consistent with the practical movements ofe-commerce development in the coming time.
To prevent tax loss from e-commerce activities, Thanh requested a comprehensivereport on tax management for e-commerce, including evaluating results,reviewing remaining problems and specifically recommending management solutionsfor each target group to prevent loss of e-commerce tax revenue.
The tax sector will continue to promote communication and guidance for peopleto declare and pay taxes with income received from e-commerce businessactivities combined with publicising the list of taxpayers with tax debt onmass media. At the same time, tax authorities will also research and applymeasures to enforce tax debt, including banning exit from the country fortaxpayers who have not fulfilled their tax obligations.
After a year of operating, the E-commerce Information Portal has recorded 357e-commerce trading floors providing information, of which many have a largemarket share, such as Shopee, Lazada, Sendo, Voso and Tiki, according to theGeneral Department of Taxation.
To date, 74 foreign suppliers have registered, declared and paid taxes throughthe electronic portal for foreign suppliers. The total tax paid by foreignsuppliers is nearly 8.1 trillion VND, of which 6.9 trillion VND was declaredand paid directly through the electronic information portal and 1.2 trillion VNDwas deducted and paid on behalf of Vietnamese parties./.
VNA
