A series of recent tax policies adopted by the lawmaking National Assembly and the Government, like VAT payment deferral for April - June, corporate income tax payment delay, exemption of some taxes and fees, and some tax reductions for easing prices of essential commodities like petroleum and gas products, will cause a deficit of more than VND10 trillion, thus affecting State Budget income.
The latest data released by the General Department of Taxation showed that tax revenues reached nearly VND280 trillion in the first six months of 2012, equal 48.1 percent of estimates in the National Assembly’s ordinance, equal to 45.5 percent of the estimates of tax collectors, and up 2.4 percent from the same period of last year. All sources of revenues fall short of estimations, except for crude oil, leaving State budget collection facing difficulties.
Bui Van Nam, General Director of the General Department of Taxation, said: Urging people and enterprises to fulfil tax obligations to the State is the key to complete tax tasks in the coming time. In particular, the focus is to intensify the fight against tax evasion, prevent enterprises’ violations in tax payments, create a fair business environment, and ensure human resources for State Budget.
At a conference on solutions to complete State budget collection plans held in late July 2012, Finance Minister Vuong Dinh Hue said: Existing difficulties caused by global and domestic economic slowdown will directly impact tax collection duties. Therefore, the tax sector needs to implement strong measures to prevent losses to the State Budget, collect debts, strengthen tax inspections, and bolster the popularity of tax policies and laws. This is also an orientation for the tax sector to complete the budgetary plan in the last months of the year.
Urgent measures are to strengthen inspections and examinations to prevent losses, where key tasks are inspections into companies with associated business transactions; refund and deduction of value added tax (VAT); collection of taxes on cross-border transactions; loss prevention among commercial business, tourism services and mining; and loss prevention among new business models like e-commerce and online business.
Particularly, as regards upcoming inspection and examination plans, General Director Bui Van Nam of the General Department of Taxation added that the tax authorities will closely monitor for transfer pricing in foreign direct investment (FDI) enterprises to prevent losses to the State Budget. This measure must be carried out synchronously and drastically, especially after the Ministry of Finance issued Decision 1250/QD-BTC to approve action plans to control transfer pricing activity in 2012 - 2015, one move to reform the tax system in the 2011 - 2020 period. The tax sector will focus on the following main tasks: studying amendments to tax policies and laws; building margin database system for independent enterprises by high-risk industry in transfer price management; referring to prices of similar products in regional countries and in the world to create common base for tax departments to use, analyse risks in transfer price management; training and fostering deep expertise for officers in charge of transfer price management to undertake this difficult task in the future. Every year, inspections into transfer price activities account for at least 20 percent of inspections made by the financial sector.
In addition, among 19 groups of measures adopted to achieve tax collection targets in 2012, key tasks include convincing and supporting taxpayers like informing them about tax departments that have single-widow tax policy; pushing up tax administrative procedure reform to reduce costs to taxpayers and automating the process of receiving tax dossiers and administrative procedures; cutting compliance costs for taxpayers, and reducing time for taxpayers.
L.Hien – T.Nga
Vietnamese
