Dr. To Hoai Nam, Standing Vice Chairman and General Secretary of the Vietnam Association of Small and Medium Enterprises, said that not only in the context of the pandemic, but the business community always hopes management agencies can come up with breakthrough solutions for businesses to focus on production, suitable for all types of businesses.

Dr. To Hoai Nam, Standing Vice President and General Secretary of Vietnam Association
of Small and Medium Enterprises.

In the current context, what do you think about the difficulties and adaptation efforts of businesses?

The most difficult thing now is that the Covid-19 pandemic is affecting all aspects of business, especially small and medium enterprises and business households. The pandemic has caused businesses to have no source of revenue, a decrease in profits, a lack of raw material supply, as well as a lack of labor due to social distancing policies, but there are places where there is an excess of labor resources due to reduced revenue and businesses cannot maintain operations.

Currently, each business field has different difficulties, but the good news is that the adaptability of enterprises has improved, thanks to the greater flexibility and endurance of Vietnamese enterprises, because they trained in a very harsh business environment. Therefore, about 25% of enterprises have gradually transformed to online models, applying information technology and e-commerce in production and business management.

However, in business, to create a sustainable factor, businesses must prepare carefully and depend a lot on their ability to prevent the pandemic. Enterprises and management agencies need to calculate more carefully between business development and disease prevention. If businesses continue to be enthusiastic about economic development but forget about the risk of the disease, it will create opposite consequences.

On the other hand, in science and technology and digital transformation, Vietnamese businesses are aware of this problem from the pressure of the pandemic. Therefore, many businesses will have gaps in terms of knowledge, human resources and infrastructure, so they need to be supplemented immediately. If they are subjective and do not comply with the standards, they must pay.

How do you evaluate the solutions to support businesses?

Support solutions and policies have contributed to the resilience of businesses. But I would like to emphasize that only contributing, not doing all the tasks, not every business can overcome problems with support. Because the problem lies in the internal capacity of enterprises and the resilience of the economy. Vietnamese businesses also understand this very well, so they have very proactive plans.

On the other hand, the support policy system is relatively complete, basically meeting the requirements of reality, which has helped many exhausted businesses that are still able to survive receiving support to help.

According to our survey, 70% of businesses are satisfied with the current support policy. Moreover, the policy to support businesses is also to support employees, and the policy to support employees is also to help businesses retain employees.

Supporting policies help the business community understand the responsibility of the Government and state agencies, creating confidence for businesses to feel that the Government needs and understands them.

Of course, what we need to question now is the efficiency of enterprises, because there is always a gap between policy promulgation and implementation.

Therefore, what needs to be done is to speed up the policy implementation process. In difficult times, support is more valuable than in normal times.

How have tax support policies affected businesses, sir?

Not only in Vietnam, but globally, tax incentives are always the most preferred by the business community. But in Vietnam, small and micro enterprises often have different tax declaration figures and business figures.

For tax policy to have a real impact, businesses must have relatively good governance, accounting reports, and transparent business data. However, in the context of the current limited budget, the draft Resolution on a number of solutions to state budget revenue to support businesses affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, which the Ministry of Finance has approved. It is a great effort and a necessary aid for businesses to have more resources to maintain operations.

In addition, the tax office can consider the time of tax finalization in 2020, in the context that businesses need capital to restore production.

In the long term, to increase the resilience of businesses, tax authorities need solutions to reduce administrative procedures.

For example, making policies for businesses to actively choose the form of tax payment. If the business has a turnover of less than VND3 billion/year, it can choose the form of paying corporate income tax at the rate of 2-3%/year on revenue.

This helps to reduce more than 15 types of documents on tax administrative procedures, but it is unlikely to reduce state budget revenue.

Thank you Sir!