Previously, Ms. Phuong submitted a request for a personal income tax refund in 2024. However, at that time, the Tax Department of Region II (HCMC) issued a notice: "The tax refund application was not qualified. Reason: In 2014, the taxpayer was in a case where he had to settle directly with the tax authority because he had 2 sources of income and had tax to pay but had not yet done so".

The notice stated the reason for not being refunded, but did not include detailed information such as: specifically where the 2 sources of income came from, what data still existed, how to handle it... This made it difficult for Ms. Phuong to check information that had arisen more than 10 years ago, when the current lookup system of the tax unit did not allow the retrieval of income data from 2014 and earlier.

Ms. Phuong had to go directly to the tax office and was instructed by the officer to make a commitment to only generate one source of income in 2014 to continue completing the dossier.

Ms. Phuong asked, in this case, what should taxpayers do to have their tax refund processed in 2024 in accordance with regulations?

She also recommended that the tax office should have a tool that allows people to proactively look up income data and tax deductions in previous years, avoiding cases of tax refund rejection due to lack of information. Improve the hotline to support people because the tax office's phone number is currently very difficult to contact and is always in a state of being unable to connect.

Regarding this issue, Ho Chi Minh City Tax Department has the following opinion:

After Ms. Phuong submitted a written request to handle the overpayment and the accompanying documents, on May 9, 2025, Ho Chi Minh City Tax Department issued a decision on tax refund to Ms. Nguyen Thi Viet Phuong, with the tax refund amount of VND 19,546,634, in accordance with the provisions of Article 60 of the Law on Tax Administration No. 38/2019/QH14, Article 25 of Circular No. 80/2021/TT-BTC and Article 28 of Circular No. 111/2013/TT-BTC.

The tax refund decision attached to the Order to refund the State budget revenue has been prepared and transferred to the State Treasury, the receiving bank is the Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam.