The tax sector is reviewing a large number of businesses that have ceased operations but have not completed dissolution procedures, as well as businesses that do not operate at registered addresses but still owe taxes, finding solutions to handle backlog cases is becoming an urgent issue.
The review focuses on 617,462 enterprises, including about 291,962 enterprises that have stopped operating but have not completed dissolution and 325,500 enterprises that do not operate at registered addresses and have tax debts. Some enterprises and business households have temporarily stopped for many years but have not completed procedures to terminate, even prolonged for 10-20 years.
According to Ms. Vu Thi Binh - Director of Binh Vu Enterprise Management Consulting and Training Co., Ltd., to remove difficulties for these businesses, the biggest difficulty is determining what a business or household business is that "has actually stopped operating". The fact that a business does not submit a declaration, does not issue an invoice or no longer operates at the registered address does not necessarily mean that the business completely does not generate business activities.
Therefore, if the exemption or non-collection of some obligations is only based on the taxpayer's presentation, it will be difficult to ensure fairness, and at the same time there is a risk of creating loopholes for some cases to take advantage of policies.
For policies to be implemented, according to Ms. Binh, first of all, it is necessary to build a relatively clear verification mechanism. Management agencies need to have a basis to determine that the enterprise does not actually generate revenue, expenses, invoices and bank transactions related to business activities during the period of consideration.
In addition, there needs to be a basis to determine the actual time when the enterprise ceases operations. This is an important factor because the time of cessation of operations will be directly related to determining the scope of obligations to be handled.
At the same time, it is necessary to distinguish cases of lack of understanding, neglect or failure to complete procedures from cases of intentionally allowing businesses to be in a "suspended" state to evade obligations.
This is an issue that is not easy to identify in practice. Without appropriate criteria and inspection mechanisms, policies to remove obstacles may not ensure the goal of supporting the right people.
More importantly, to be implemented in practice, there need to be specific legal regulations on the scope of application, clearly defining which amounts are exempted, which amounts taxpayers still have to implement, and which procedures will be used to handle backlog dossiers.
If the policy is issued, the removal should focus on businesses and business households that have actually stopped operating, no business activities have arisen and there are no signs of fraud.
Building clear verification criteria, while classifying each group of cases correctly, will be an important basis to both resolve prolonged backlogs and ensure that policies do not become loopholes to evade obligations.
