HCMC – Ecommerce platforms will have to provide certain personal data of sellers to tax agencies on a monthly basis, as regulated in Circular No. 40/2021 which will take effect from August 1 this year.
The Ministry of Finance has issued Circular No. 40 giving guidelines on value added tax, personal income tax and tax management for business households and business individuals. Under the circular, business individuals offering ecommerce services, including those earning revenue from digital products and services, have been added to the list of taxpayers.
Commenting on the tax collection methods for these business individuals, Nguyen Thi Lan Anh, head of the Tax Administration Department on Small and Medium Enterprises, Business Households and Individuals under the ministry’s General Department of Taxation, said that ecommerce platforms will have to make tax statements and pay taxes on behalf of business individuals as stipulated in Clause 1, Article 8, of the circular.
To do this, Lan said that ecommerce platforms will identify taxable revenues and the amount of taxes they have to pay on behalf of business individuals based on revenues and other earnings that these business individuals have obtained via ecommerce platforms. The other earnings include the amount of money gained through delivery service providers and intermediary payment services.
Ecommerce platforms will record all the information about tax statements and tax payments that they paid on behalf of sellers, Anh told a virtual conference held by the General Department of Taxation on June 15.
Ecommerce platforms are also required to provide invoices and other legal documents for each order for buyers and sellers from now on. Sellers have to provide invoices and related documents upon the request of buyers, in line with prevailing regulations.
She added that ecommerce platforms are responsible for providing e-information about sellers’ full names, identity cards/passports, tax codes, email addresses, residential addresses, phone numbers, revenues and bank accounts to tax agencies monthly.
As for platforms that have insufficient data as mentioned above, they have to update their data system before August 1 this year, she noted.
In addition, sellers on ecommerce platforms were required to have fixed business locations and register for tax at their place of business to be granted tax codes. Besides this, sellers have to provide business information for ecommerce platforms, including names, addresses of their business locations, business registration certificate/tax codes, phone numbers, information about products, services, prices, delivery services and payment methods.
Nguyen Thi Thanh Huyen, deputy general director of EY Vietnam Company, said that Circular No.40 taking effect from August 1 would leave a huge impact on enterprises and such a regulation is unprecedented. She added that up to 3.5 million transactions are made on e-commerce platforms each day in Vietnam.
Ecommerce platforms handle a substantial amount of workload every day. Therefore, tax agencies should arrange groups of IT experts in the taxation sector to coordinate with ecommerce platforms to upgrade their infrastructure to serve the tax administration, Huyen suggested.
Vu Thi Minh Tu, director of Lazada Company, proposed the local taxation authority work out a feasible roadmap to implement the circular as well as issue guidelines on which State agencies are authorized to ask for information and the scope of information from enterprises to ensure information security and avoid violating regulations of other sectors.
Wrapping up the online event, Dang Ngoc Minh, deputy head of the General Department of Taxation, said that all feedback from businesses on the circular was recorded. Tax authorities will study and suggest solutions to address problems arising in the tax management on ecommerce platforms and submit them to the higher authority for consideration.
