The Vietnam Federation of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) has just sent the Ministry of Finance a document commenting on the draft decree regulating tax management for business activities on e-commerce platforms and digital platforms of business households and individuals. Notably, VCCI proposed to postpone the online sales tax collection time by 3 months.
The draft is expected to take effect from April 1, 2025. VCCI said that according to the company's reflection, the effective date is relatively urgent (in less than 2 months), while the document is still in the drafting stage, the company needs time to build an information technology system, human resources and promote to sellers.
Therefore, to support businesses in having time to prepare technology systems, personnel and guide sellers, VCCI proposed to postpone the application of the regulation to July 1, 2025, 3 months later than the draft.
VCCI believes that tax collection is necessary, but it is necessary to develop a tax collection method to ensure reduction of administrative procedures and compliance burden for businesses and individuals.
At the same time, with the participation of many entities in the new method, the regulations also need to clearly define the responsibilities and obligations of the parties to serve as a legal basis for implementation.
This unit assessed that the draft does not allow individuals doing business on e-commerce platforms to pay taxes under the contract method. The drafting agency may speculate that all e-commerce business activities use software and can extract revenue data quickly, so the declaration method can be applied.
However, VCCI believes that the above regulation is not suitable for individuals who are new to business or have a small scale. Due to limited capital, these individuals do not buy business support software and will have difficulty making the above declaration.
VCCI recommends that the drafting agency consider amending the direction of allowing declaration according to contract tax applied to business individuals with the number of orders below the threshold (information on the number of orders that can be extracted through transport units).
At the same time, the draft requires individuals doing business on e-commerce platforms to declare business costs, but according to VCCI, it is not necessary because tax is calculated on revenue.
Requiring detailed declaration of items such as capital, labor, electricity/water, transportation, etc. can create a burden for small-scale business individuals.
VCCI also disagrees with the regulation that e-commerce platforms are responsible for transferring deduction documents to tax authorities.
The reason is that the platforms have declared in detail the monthly deductible tax rates, and the tax authorities have full information and data on taxpayers and the tax payable.
The mandatory transfer of tax deduction documents for a large volume (symptoms from each year) will increase costs for businesses.
In addition, the draft stipulates that taxable revenue is the total amount of money from the sale of goods and services that e-commerce platforms collect from buyers.
VCCI believes that this regulation is understood that the seller's revenue will be the total amount that the buyer pays. This is not suitable because each transaction conducted through the platform includes many products/servings such as products/servings of the seller, shipping services, services of the platform, payment services, etc. Thus, the amount the buyer pays for the transaction is the total amount paid for the above services, not just paid to the seller.
Therefore, to ensure reasonableness, VCCI proposes that the drafting agency amend in the direction that tax revenue is the amount of money that e-commerce platforms plan to pay to individuals doing business.
To support businesses with time to prepare technology systems, human resources and guide sellers, VCCI proposed postponing the application of the regulation to July 1, 2025, three months later than the draft.
