Tax returns set to hit cyber highway

Truong Hai Duong, director of the General Department of Taxation’s Information Technology Centre, said the department was moving forward with its plans for the electronic filing of tax forms for both domestic and foreign enterprises.
The centre began providing businesses with accounting and encoding software for the transmission of tax information early last year.
Several businesses have already participated in a trial programme for internal calculation, declaration and payment of taxes.
In its aim to ensure accuracy in declarations, the programme will eventually do away with hard copies altogether, but is currently still using printed materials bearing encoded labels for electronic readers.
“We are still compiling project documents with supporting legality to protect electronically filed documents. We expect that business tax forms will be filed electronically by 2008,” Duong said.
Under the project, the centre will study technology that can be harnessed for the filing of online declarations, as well as purchasing commercial-grade e-filling software from other countries, which will then be customised for local application.
Duong said the most important part of the study was examining the existing accounting software used by businesses in order to ensure their outputs meet the required fields on Vietnamese declarations.
Problems have been encountered with some enterprises whose software does not support export information to the declaration file automatically rather than entering data manually.
“Entering the figures manually ensures output figures are entered into the correct input fields on the declaration. This has been troublesome for some enterprises,” Duong said.
The department will also cooperate with the Institute of Information Technology for Businesses (ITB) under the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry to survey the level of information technology application and communication networks within enterprises. The survey will determine the status of 2 million home businesses and about 200,000 small and medium-sized enterprises.
“Home businesses and SMEs will undoubtedly have problems with online tax declarations, as most lack the required equipment and infrastructure,” Duong explained.
The department piloted electronic declaration in 2002, testing the project with 30 enterprises.
However, with no legal documentation to protect valuable information being transferred via the internet, the department was forced to end the trial.
Duong said the centre is compiling further proposals for the legal protection of electronically transferred information, as well as measures to deal with disputes that could arise as a result of network faults.
The department also signed a cooperative agreement with the ITB last week to promote IT application in businesses. The two parties will support enterprises applying solutions that support electronic declarations, while conducting further surveys of business IT application, and promoting training in IT usage.
“We will link our e-commerce portal to the IT centre under the department for online taxation management,” ITB director Nguyen Van Thao said .
Electronic declaration is part of a wider push for modernisation of the taxation department by 2010.
The centre will establish a national taxation information data centre, which will be linked with regional tax departments via the proposed government network, and expand electronic declarations for individuals to pay income tax.




No. 760/May 8-14, 2006