Vietnam’s General Department of Taxation is speeding up a project to
modernise the country’s tax administration so that it can be completed
by 2015.
The Tax Administration Modernisation Project (TAMP)
is expected to improve tax management capacity at all levels, reduce
corruption and support taxpayers through improved e-tax services.
It was launched in 2008 with approved investment of 97.5 million USD
including preferential loans of 80 million USD from the World Bank, a
12.5 million USD loan from Japan and Vietnam’s counterpart capital
of 5 million USD.
At a meeting on April 25 with
representatives from tax offices in the northern region focused on
changes that the tax sector is facing and preparations to deal with the
changes. Vice director of the project management board Nguyen Minh Ngoc
said that the move was expected to help the country realise its Tax
Reform Strategy towards 2020.
Vietnam seeks to build a
tax policy system that is comprehensive, consistent, fair, efficient and
suitable to the socialist-oriented market economy. Simplified
transparent tax management is based on three major pillars: simplified
administrative procedures, qualified human resources and highly
integrated automatic information technological applications.
Ngoc said that the strategy included ambitious goals, such as placing
Vietnam fourth in the region in tax advantage by 2020, applying
information technology in all tax offices and ensuring that 90 percent
of enterprises used e-tax services.
The project would focus on
improving risk management and enforcement analysis in the tax sector,
anti-corruption activities, applying information technology in tax
management and project management capacity building, Ngoc added.
“80 percent of the project investment will be spent to deal with IT
development, which will primarily support the procurement and
implementation of a proven Integrated Tax Administration Information
System (ITAIS),” he said.
The ITAIS will support all tax
management processes (including tax registration, data processing, tax
payment, refunds and detecting violations) for all kind of taxes except
personal income tax.
Yet Ngoc cautioned that introducing the
innovation could be risky, bringing up issues such as incompatibility
between systems and a shortage of staff qualified to use it.
Senior World Bank economist Pham Minh Duc said that the legal framework
for taxation had been improved through reforms in 1990 and 1998,
approvals for amended tax management law in 2012 and the amended
Corporate Income Tax Law and Value-added Tax Law in 2013 as well as the
Tax Reform Strategy from 2011 to 2020.
A 2011 World Bank survey
on tax reform showed that the Vietnamese tax system ensured relative
equality, as people with higher incomes or expenditure paid higher
taxes, Duc said.
However, the cost for enforcement of tax
regulations in Vietnam was also high, as measured by the number of times
people paid taxes and number of hours spent on taxpaying procedures.-VNA