Prime Minister: Tax industry needs to immediately eliminate the situation of 'grease money'

Strengthening the quality of tax officials is one of the tasks for the tax sector given by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc at the industry conference on the afternoon of January 31.

Emphasizing the important role of the General Department of Taxation, one of the departments with the largest number of staff in the country with 44,000 people, the Prime Minister highly appreciated Vietnam's efforts in tax reform as well as improving its tax payment index.

Accordingly, Vietnam's tax payment index in 2017 increased by 81 places (from 167th to 86th), ranking 4th in the ASEAN group, completing the assigned tasks in Resolution 19. This is the fastest ranking increase among the 10 criteria for assessing the business environment in 2017. In addition, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said that the team of civil servants has had many steps of maturity and development in both breadth and depth to adapt to the requirements of innovation and integration.

However, the head of the Government requested to overcome the worrying situation of corruption, negativity, and harassment among a number of tax officials. Citing the results of the VCCI investigation showing that the cost of bribery for tax inspectors and examiners is still high, the Prime Minister said that the tax sector needs to take strong measures to immediately eliminate this situation. According to him, the tax sector should send out the message "Tax officials say no to negativity". Along with that, there is the need to inspect, strictly handle, and remove from the sector corrupt, degenerate, and corrupt officials and civil servants.

In addition to strengthening the quality of staff, budget collection is always one of the top tasks of the tax sector. In 2018, the Prime Minister emphasized the effort to increase budget collection by 3% compared to the estimate assigned by the National Assembly. In addition, the tax sector needs to complete the target of reducing the rate of tax arrears to below 5% of the total state budget revenue.

The Head of Government also requested to cut and simplify 50% of the list of goods, products and specialized inspection procedures; cut and simplify 50% of investment and business conditions. Promote restructuring of the State budget towards gradually increasing the proportion of domestic revenue; ensure the proportion of development investment expenditure is 26%, the proportion of regular expenditure is 64.1% of the total State budget expenditure.

At the tax industry conference, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc frankly stated that tax policy is still changing too quickly and too much.leading to many consequences for people and businesses. According to him, the current tax policy is still thinking from the perspective of benefiting the State management agency and not aiming at protecting the rights of taxpayers.

"At the same time, tax policy still focuses on increasing tax rates rather than expanding the tax base, while it is entirely possible to expand the tax base to new forms of economy, trade, and services such as global economic integration, sharing economy, e-commerce, e-services, online tourism, online sales...", he said.