On the morning of December 8, Minister of Finance Nguyen Van Thang presented a report on the draft Law amending and supplementing a number of articles of the Law on Value Added Tax (VAT).
After the current VAT Law took effect from January 1, 2025, the Government and the Ministry of Finance received many recommendations and reflections from associations and businesses on the difficulties of VAT policies for the fields of agriculture, animal feed and tax refund conditions.
According to Minister Nguyen Van Thang, the draft law amends 3 main contents.
Firstly, it is necessary to include the content that has been regulated since 2014 on cooperatives and cooperative unions not having to calculate VAT but being deducted from input VAT when selling unprocessed crop, planted forest, animal husbandry, and caught aquatic products or only through regular processing for other cooperative and cooperative unions.
This regulation has been implemented stably for many years, ensuring that it does not violate the principles of VAT, while not affecting state budget revenue. In addition, it will help reduce the administrative burden on businesses.
Contributing to supporting agricultural, forestry and fishery exports when businesses do not have to advance money to pay taxes, then carry out tax refund procedures, avoiding wasting time and opportunity costs of businesses.
The leader of the Ministry of Finance said that according to reports from businesses, the tea and coffee industries must contribute about VND 5,000 billion, the food industry is about VND 2,016 billion, and the pepper and spice industries are about VND 2,162 billion to pay VAT.
Second, remove unprocessed crop, plant and animal rights, and aquaculture products caught into other products or only through conventional processing used as animal feed and medicinal herbs, then apply the VAT rate according to the tax rate prescribed for crop, plant and animal rights, and aquaculture products as prescribed in Clause 5, Article 9 of the current Law on VAT.
This is to ensure the application of VAT in accordance with the provisions of the law on animal feed, ensuring equality with imported animal feed because imported animal feed is not subject to tax, while domestically produced animal feed has an input VAT of 5%, so it must be included in the cost of increasing the selling price.
Third, remove regulations on tax refund conditions: Buyers will only receive tax refunds when the seller has declared tax payment in Point c, Clause 9, Article 15, VAT Law 2024.
The draft law has added regulations to strengthen tax management for taxpayers to ensure correct and sufficient collection of tax money to the state budget and to strengthen tax refund management as well as taxpayer inspection.
Reviewing this content, Chairman of the Economic and Financial Committee Phan Van Mai said that in case the amended contents are approved by the National Assembly to return to the provisions of the previous law, the Government is requested to take responsibility for the amended contents, ensuring that the bottlenecks in tax refunds and problems and inadequacies arising from practice are resolved.
At the same time, ensure regulations on controlling power and preventing corruption and negativity in law-making work; do not let policy profiteering and invoice fraud occur, causing loss and damage to the state budget as has occurred in the recent past; do not create new difficulties and obstacles for taxpayers and other related subjects.
