10 Years Coordinating Business Registration and Tax Registration: Settlement Time Reduced

Recently, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Planning and Investment gathered to assess 10 years of coordinating business registration and tax registration. The combination is considered very successful and this is another stepping stone for the deployment of e-government.

Ms Tran Hong Minh, Director of the Business Registration Administration Bureau under the Ministry of Planning and Investment, said, the coordination between business registration offices and tax offices was formalised for the first time in 2007 when the Ministry of Planning and Investment, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Finance issued Circular 02/2007/TTLT/BKH-BTC-BCA and then Circular 05/2008/TTLT/BKH-BTC-BCA guiding coordination mechanism for settlement of three procedures - business registration, tax registration and seal granting - towards rationalising implementation stages of these three types of procedures with the single-window mechanism.

Since then, agencies have joined hands to reduce the time needed to settle the three procedures from 32 days to 15 days for new enterprises and 12 days for new branches, representative offices and changes in business registration contents.

Since 2010, the Government issued Decree 43/2010/ND-CP on business registration, which unified contents of business registration and tax code registration in a single document submitted to the Department of Planning and investment; used the corporate tax code system as the business registration code in order to simplify and reduce the time of settling two procedures to 5 business days. Since then, the coordination between business registration agencies and tax offices has been strengthened and improved over the previous period, thanks to information exchange systems between the two.

“It can be said that while Circular 02 and Circular 05 are the first legal documents providing the legal basis for coordination of business registration and tax registration, Decree 43 improves the coordination mechanism between the two branches to a new high by employing electronic communications to lay the foundation for more automatic, modern and advanced electronic coordination,” she stressed.

In order to facilitate people and enterprises to enter the market, the Law on Enterprises 2014 reduces the processing time of business registration documents, including both business registration and tax registration, to just three working days.

To realise it, the Government issued Decree 78/2015/ND-CP in place of Decree 43 to improve the mechanism of automatic electronic coordination of business registration agency and tax agency by adopting the automatic process of granting corporate identification numbers from tax offices in order to shorten registration time as stipulated in the Law on Enterprises. Mr Nguyen Dai Tri, Deputy General Director of General Department of Taxation under the Ministry of Finance, said, “In 10 years from 2007 to 2017, we have witnessed dramatic improvement in business and investment environment in general, and market entry procedures for enterprises in particular.”

This has been recognised and appreciated by people, the business community and international organisations. The Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) surveys during this period have shown most significant improvements in “market entry” indicator which has always been at the top of PCI rankings indicators in 10 years in a row. The above achievements are the result of a period of effort and development of individuals and organisations fulfilling business registration and tax registration both at the central and local levels.

Hien Hung