There is still abuse of inspection activities to harass businesses.

This morning (January 12), the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) announced the 2020 Business Law Flow Report, built on the basis of business practices and in-depth research.

Presenting the Business Law Flow Report, Mr. Dau Anh Tuan,Head of VCCI Legal DepartmentIt is emphasized that the inspection and examination work of state agencies has a great influence on the operations of enterprises.

Vietnamese law has the Law on Inspection, which regulates business inspection activities. Although not really transparent and reasonable, the provisions of the Law on Inspection have helped to avoid arbitrariness or abuse of power by many agencies and officials towards businesses, Mr. Tuan said.

According to Mr. Dau Anh Tuan,Law on InspectionThe law requires that inspections must have an annual plan, and in the case of periodic inspections, an inspection decision must be made and sent to the enterprise in advance. The enterprise is allowed to explain the draft inspection conclusion, and the final conclusion must be provided to the enterprise. The law also stipulates specific time periods for each step of an inspection. However, there are currently no such regulations for inspection activities. Meanwhile, there is an overlap between inspection and business examination in terms of the content and legal consequences of these two activities.

"Therefore, the situation of many state agencies abusing inspection activities to harass businesses still occurs. In 2020, the Ministry of Finance drafted a Circular guiding the inspection of the activities of enterprises providing accounting services. The draft will empower the agencies of the Ministry of Finance to inspect enterprises and individuals providing accounting services," said Mr. Dau Anh Tuan.

However, the Head of the VCCI Legal Department said that the draft did not clarify the relationship between inspection and examination, and it was unclear whether the enterprise was inspected and examined for the same content. In addition, the draft did not clarify many issues of inspection activities such as the basis for surprise inspection, the time to announce the inspection plan, the deadline for issuing inspection conclusions and providing them to the enterprise, and did not apply the principle of risk management to the selection of the enterprise to be inspected or the service contract to be inspected.

Mr. Dau Anh Tuan emphasized that this draft is an illustrative example showing that the Vietnamese legal system still lacks many regulations to create transparency and prevent abuse of power in the country.business inspection activities"This is an issue that needs to be studied and resolved in the future, possibly through amending the Law on Inspection to include inspection activities," Mr. Tuan commented./.