At the online seminar "Bringing electronic invoices into life" organized by the Government Portal, Nguyen Dai Tri, Deputy Director General of the General Department of Taxation said that according to preliminary estimates of the General Department of Taxation, enterprises spend VND4,000 billion (roughly US$176.33 million) on using paper invoices a year. If e-invoices are used instead of paper ones, enterprises can save up to VND3,000 billion (equivalent to US$132.45 million) a year.
According to Tri, e-invoices bring great benefits to both tax authorities and enterprises in archiving, using, saving time and reducing management costs. In addition, the e-invoices help tax authorities detect enterprises’ fraudulent behaviors.
However, there is a paradox that despite saving thousands of billions of VND a year, tax authorities are still “ignored” by enterprises.
Tri stated that the electronic bill has been deployed for several years; however, as of June 2017, only 2,000 enterprises applied e-invoices.
Explaining this, Dau Anh Tuan, General Director of the Legal Department under the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) said that there are five issues regarding the current e-invoices proposal make enterprises concerned.
Specifically, the asynchronous application of e-invoices conducted by State’s agencies. If the tax authorities switch to use e-invoices while other State’s management agencies still use paper invoices, this will cause difficulties for enterprises. Furthermore, many enterprises are worried about the information infrastructure system, security issue and fees related to e-invoices.
In order to make electronic invoices widely and effectively applied, it is important to deploy the synchronous application of e-invoices among the State’s agencies. Moreover, the actions of both State’s agencies and enterprises also required, Tuan emphasized.
