Habeco requested to pay $81mil in tax liabilities

The State Audit of Vietnam (SAV) has proposed the Hanoi Beer Alcohol and Beverage JSC (Habeco) pay the State budget 1.85 trillion VND (81 million USD) in tax liabilities (Photo: vneconomy.vn)

The move came after the SAV examined financial statements and activities related to the management and use of capital and assets in 2016 at Habeco and its affiliates.

The SAV pointed out a series of errors, violations of the administration and use of State capital of Habeco in 2016.

The total 1.85 trillion VND tax arrears that Habeco has to pay includes 4.5 billion VND in value added tax, more than 441 billion VND in excise tax, over 9 billion VND in corporate income tax, 381 million VND in personal income tax and nearly 1.3 trillion VND in other liabilities.

The company was also told to reduce the state budget receivables to nearly 5.8 billion VND.

According to the SAV, Habeco parent company’s expenditure on programmes and events in 2016 had exceeded the initial plan by 4.7 billion VND.

It added that in 2016, the parent company held 30 overseas business trips. However, 24 trips had unclear programmes and 19 had incomplete legal procedures and unclear results.

Regarding the parent company’s beer purchase price policy for subsidiaries, the SAV pointed out there was no relation between the purchase prices and the producers’ profits. The determination of the beer purchase prices were all calculated by the prices of the previous year adjusted following the tax-related factors or the output prices.

SAV also stated that the interests Habeco’s shareholders were negatively affected due to the parent company’s misusing and mismanaging the state capital.

It said the parent company had a large bank deposit but it had yet made an overall reasoned assessment on the credit institutions to select those with competitive interest rates.

Habeco completed eight licensing agreements with eight companies under its system in 2016, with contracted production of 68.5 million litres of beer. These agreements required that the eight companies had to sell beer at higher prices than Habeco.

However, Habeco had not examined those companies’ selling activities, leading to big differences between the selling prices they reported and the actual selling prices. And no violations were detected and handled in accordance with the contracts.

According to Sabeco’s audited financial report, Habeco’s parent company’s revenue in 2016 reached nearly 7.7 trillion VND, up 12.3 percent against 2015. Of this, revenue from the sale of beer was 6.6 trillion VND and revenue from the sale of raw materials was more than 1 trillion VND. Habeco’s equity as of December 31, 2016 was 4.3 trillion VND.