After many years of doing other jobs, accumulating a capital to return to business, the new company owner discovered that the old business still existed in a state of non-operation at the registered address. The company owner worried that the capital for a new start could be used to handle a business that had closed many years ago.
This is not an isolated story. As of June 2026, nearly 600,000 businesses have stopped operating but have not completed procedures to terminate the validity of tax codes or no longer operate at registered addresses. This is a major bottleneck that causes backlogs to increase, procedures to be prolonged, social resources to be kept, and data on the business sector not reflecting the reality.
The Tax sector has seen the problem and implemented the campaign "clean up tax codes - remove bottlenecks in business". The goal is to reduce backlogs and make tax databases accurate, complete, clean and live.
This is something that needs to be done. But data cleaning must go hand in hand with solutions so that removal does not become a loophole. Because in nearly 600,000 cases, there are businesses that fail, lack understanding or "forget" procedures. There are also legal entities established to buy and sell invoices, evade taxes, and commit fraud. These two groups cannot bear the same handling method.
For businesses that have actually ceased operations, do not generate revenue, expenses, invoices, business transactions and show no signs of fraud, a suitable mechanism for removing them is needed. In particular, it is necessary to simplify procedures. Conversely, "ghost" businesses, buying and selling invoices, abandoning addresses to evade taxes, and forging information must be strictly handled.
Clearly removing businesses that are no longer operating from the system is also giving more opportunities for those who have failed to start over, bringing idle resources back to the market.
In the long term, it is necessary to build a strong enough database to classify businesses, identify which legal entities are truly "dead", and which cases show signs of risk to focus resources on inspection. The warning system must also go first, businesses that are both slow to fulfill tax obligations need to be notified immediately on the digital platform. It is impossible to let a small violation last for many years, until businesses want to return to the market to discover a "legacy" of obligations waiting to be handled.
More importantly, data must be connected so that management agencies know which businesses are operating, which businesses have stopped, and which businesses are at risk. Clean data will help simplify procedures, manage more accurately, and resources will be allocated in the right places.
