According to the Department of Taxation of Ho Chi Minh City, the latest regulations in Decree no 123/2020/CP-NĐ of the Government about invoicessay that from 1 July, 2022, companies must apply e- invoices; red invoices will continuously apply till 30 June 2022.

From now to July 2022, businesses have to use invoices as normal until the Tax Department announces to businesses and enterprises for implementing e-invoices.

As e-invoices are being encouraged, there is a lot of confusion among businesses in the implementation process. There are many problems about transferring e-invoice data to tax authorities; registering to use electronic invoices without acode of the tax agency; procedures for converting e-invoices registered into electronic invoices with authentication codes of tax authorities.

Answering questions of businesses about whether they have sent an e-invoice including a statement or not, the Ho Chi Minh City Tax Department said based on the current regulations, e-invoices include specific messages based on goods and services, enterprises do not have to submit a statement. When transporting goods via road, enterprises want to convert electronic invoices into paper invoices to prove the legality of goods, they must comply with Clause 1, Article 12 of Circular 32 of the Ministry of Finance.

In particular, the regulation of e-invoices is that the date of making and the date of signing must be the same, while in many fields, this requirement is not easy, so businesses face difficulties. To facilitate and remove difficulties for taxpayers during the transition to electronic invoices, Ho Chi Minh City Tax Department encourages enterprises to apply components containing electronic invoice data and methods of transmission with tax authorities to comply with regulations.

PDF file is not an electronic invoice

According to the Ho Chi Minh City Tax Department, as of September 30, 2020, the number of businesses using e-invoices reached 126,516, equivalent to 62.21% of the total number of operating businesses using invoices.

However, currently in Ho Chi Minh City there are more than 100 businesses using electronic invoices with authentication codes of the tax authorities. This number is too small compared to the number of 250,000 businesses operating in the area of Ho Chi Minh City. As a rule, from July 2022, when it is mandatory to use e-invoices, businesses must apply these rules. The General Department of Taxation is building infrastructure to store e-invoice data and transmission method with tax authorities.

Regarding the receipt and storage of electronic invoices, Deputy Director Nguyen Nam Binh said that many people now think aPDF file sent to the buyer by the seller is an electronic invoice, but it is not. The PDF file must be accompanied by a file containing invoice data, which means an XML file showing all information of the sales unit, company name, tax code and sales will be considered an electric invoice. Thus, an electronic invoice is a collection of electronic data messages about selling goods and providing services, created, made, sent, received, stored and managed electronically.

How can businesses store electronic invoices? Ho Chi Minh City Tax Department said that in case an e-invoice is generated from the system of an intermediary e-invoice solution, this intermediary must also store e-invoices by time as mentioned above. The seller andbuyer is the accounting unit and the intermediary e-invoice solution that is responsible for backing up data of the e-invoice to media (such as: a memory stick; CD and DVD; external hard disk; internal hard disk) or perform online backups to protect e-invoice data.

According to Mr. Binh, there are many different electronic invoice solution providers. Each provider has different solutions and standard designs for electronic invoices. Therefore, the problem is that if an enterprise deals with hundreds of partners and each partner uses adifferent e-invoice provider, which software can read all of these standards? This is also a problem forbusinesses. On that basis, businesses should consider and select e-invoice solution providers to use, suitable for the next two years before it is mandatory.

“The Ho Chi Minh City Tax Department is currently working with two suppliers and advocating for these two providers to let businesses use this software for free for a while before making the service. Accordingly, this software will check whether e-invoices are legal orfake, avoiding risks for businesses," Mr. Nguyen Nam Binhsaid.