National Assembly discusses Draft Law on Tax Administration

Regarding the content of penalties for false declaration, delegates said that the draft law needs strict regulations and sanctions with sufficient deterrence.

Previously, on the morning of October 25, the National Assembly worked in the Hall, listened to the Report on explanation, acceptance and revision of the draft Law amending and supplementing a number of articles of the Law on Tax Administration and continued to discuss a number of contents of this draft Law with different opinions.

The contents that many delegates contributed opinions on included: the time limit for checking previous tax refund dossiers; handling late tax payment, penalties for false declaration; authority to extend tax payment... Many delegates said that the regulation that the time limit for checking previous tax refund dossiers is no more than 10 years is too long.

(photo: mof.gov.vn)

Delegate Vu Xuan Truong, Nam Dinh delegation, commented: “Currently, in reality, there are units that request tax refunds 2 to 3 times a year, but are only inspected once. So how are the other times calculated? Therefore, to resolve this issue, in my opinion, all cases of tax refunds under the refund-first-check method must be inspected within 1 year or no more than 6 months for high-risk cases, which must be inspected within 3 months to ensure effective tax management.”

Regarding the content of penalties for false declaration, delegates said that the draft law needs to have strict regulations and sanctions that are strong enough to deter and handle false declarations that lead to a lack of tax payable or false declaration of tax refunds, causing budget losses. Regarding the regulations on handling late tax payment, delegate Nguyen Van Binh, Hai Phong city delegation, said that most cases of late tax payment are businesses facing difficulties. Therefore, the penalty of 0.07% as in the draft law is too high and not feasible.

Delegate Nguyen Van Binh commented: “I think that the draft law amending and supplementing the regulation on the penalty for late payment of 0.07% per day calculated on the amount of late tax payment is too high and does not ensure the feasibility of the law. In reality, most of the enterprises that are late in paying are enterprises facing difficulties in production and business. If the regulation of 0.07% per day is equal to 25% per year, it will cause difficulties for enterprises to continue to pile up, leading to higher tax arrears. Therefore, I suggest that the drafting committee consider keeping the penalty for late tax payment as prescribed in the current Law on Tax Administration.”

To avoid cases of issuing fake invoices for tax refund procedures, delegate Do Thu Hang of Dong Nai delegation proposed to “add sanctions to handle the act of declaring taxes but not paying taxes, fleeing from the place of business registration. Because in the past and present, many businesses have fled, but the law has not yet stipulated sanctions to handle, making it easy for people to take advantage of establishing businesses, issuing invoices for other businesses to do tax refund procedures, causing losses to the state budget.”

The majority of delegates agreed with the National Assembly Standing Committee’s addition to Article 50 of the Draft to stipulate that the Government decides to extend tax payment deadlines in cases where tax payment extension does not lead to adjustments to the state budget revenue estimates approved by the National Assembly. This provision will ensure flexibility for the Government in applying policies and create conditions to promptly remove difficulties for enterprises’ production and business activities./.

According to (vov.vn)-LT