AMENDING TAX ADMINISTRATION LAW IN 2018

To collect taxes in arrears, the General Department of Taxation has built and assigned tax debt collection tasks in 2017 to every unit from the beginning of 2017 and directed them to apply measures to coercively collect overdue taxes according to the law. 63 tax departments across the country collected VND22,076 billion of taxes in arrears in the year to May 31, equal to 46.7 per cent of tax debt as of December 31, 2016 and up 13.5 per cent over the same period in 2016.

Total tax debt was VND75,534 billion as of May 31, 2017, an increase of VND1,390 billion (1.9 per cent) compared to that on December 31, 2016. Of the sum, recoverable tax debt - up to 90 days and over 90 days - was VND48,207 billion. Meanwhile, unrecoverable value was VND27,327 billion because taxpayers were dead, lost civil act capacity, involved in criminal responsibility and got bankrupt.

Although tax debt collection was better than previous years, it was still very hard for all localities to get this job done. Most tax departments proposed amending debt classification criteria to portray the true nature of tax receivables because some are classified as recoverable but they can be hardly taken back. In addition, localities asked the General Department of Taxation and the Ministry of Finance to consider debt management processes applied to business households and sold debts and late payments. Therefore, according to the Ministry of Finance, it is necessary to prepare a new Law on Tax Administration to replace the Law of 2005 right from the end of 2017 to get it submitted to the lawmakers for ratification in 2018 if we want to deal with VND27 trillion of tax debts incurred by inactive companies. The tax sector sees this as an important task to recollect recoverable debt debts and minimise new debts, aimed to bring the rate of overdue taxes to less than 5 per cent of tax revenue.

Source: VCCI