With more than 262,000 business households in HCM City, the HCM City Tax Department is implementing a management model using digital maps, to focus on managing tax collection against revenue loss. A reporter of Customs News had an interview with the Director of HCM City Tax Department Le Duy Minh about this modern form of management.

Director of HCM CIty Tax Department Le Duy Minh

What are the initial results of pilot implementation of business household management solutions on digital maps at some tax branches?

In 2020, the HCM City Tax Department piloted the business households management solution on digital maps at Regional Tax Branch of District 12, Hoc Mon District and District 1 Tax Branch. Initially, it showed the feasibility of the project and the practicality of applying information technology in tax administration, helping the tax authority to improve the efficiency of business household management in the city, and support the tax authority to easily manage business households in assigned areas and also as a connection channel with taxpayers with many attached utilities. This was a very important basis for the HCM City Tax Department to consider applying the business households management application on digital maps for large scale implementation following the process that has been consulted on by tax authorities and taxpayers for completing the application.

With a large number of business households, digital mapping to manage business households in HCM City aimed to help the tax authority quickly detect and put into tax administration with the remaining households. Does this work have any difficulties or advantages?

Digital mapping to manage business households in the city is aimed to visualise business households data on smart mobile devices to help tax authorities easily observe and manage business households and reduce manual operations in the management process, helping tax authorities have more time to focus on checking business households’ activities. From that, it is easy to detect business households not declared to tax authorities but implement incorrectly the declaration in particular and tax regulations in general.

There are also many difficulties in the early stage of implementation. Firstly, the business households gathered in markets such as Ben Thanh market, buildings with a lot of business households, and locations with more than two business households working together led to overlapping the coordinates on the map, the HCM City Tax Department has experimented with many solutions to choose the best solution to help tax authorities in management.

Secondly, address planning of routes in Vietnam is not in accordance with general standards and the address structure on the centralised tax system is not clearly defined, leading to inaccurate positioning of business households coordinates on the meeting map in the first stage of implementation.

Thirdly, at a coordinates with many business households, but when going in the field, there are many overlapping signs as business households left the business address, stopped operation but they have not completed tax code procedures or temporary business suspension procedures. Thus, it caused difficulty in determining the status of business households during the first implementation and needs the assistance of local tax authorities to determine the active business households. Then link to the General Department of Taxation to clean the system or choose the best treatment solution. Besides the difficulties in digital mapping, there are also the difficulties in the operation of human, system, technology application to make it effectively.

At the National Conference on Reviewing tasks performance of tax sector in 2020 and deploying tasks in 2021, Deputy Prime Minister Truong Hoa Binh directed the tax sector to focus on managing tax collection of business households and non-State enterprises regions because this field still has many potential risks of tax loss. How will HCM City Tax Department deploy this content?

HCM City Tax Department has developed a key work programme outline for 2021 with many tasks set out on revenue collection, dissemination and support to taxpayers, the work of declaring and managing taxpayers, tax inspection, debt management and tax debt enforcement, managing revenue collected from land, administrative reform work, staff organisation and intra-industry management, and many others tasks for the common duties of the tax sector. In particular, management of tax collection requires modernisation of the tax administration apparatus; continuing to build a centralised and unified taxpayer database; stepping up the application of information technology to tax administration activities, ensuring high cohesion and automation in connection with tax administrative procedure reform and electronic tax application.

In addition, HCM City Tax Department strengthens the inspection and prevention of tax loss for each key industry, each key area, effectively on the basis of the application of information technology to analyse, evaluate risks and classify taxpayers; effectively apply inspection and examination skills to detect, prevent and promptly handle acts of price transfer, tax fraud, tax evasion and improve the quality of inspection and examination; to promptly and properly settle cases of tax complaints and denunciations of taxpayers.