Ha Noi prevents purchasing and selling of invalid invoices

Ha Noi Department of Tax has been carrying out various measures to prevent tax fraud activities. Photo: Internet.

Since the end of 2012, Ha Noi Department of Tax in coordination with the Information Technology Department under the General Department of Taxation has developed the application “invoices collating” to analyse, filter and cross-check enterprises’ data.

By doing this, the Department of Tax has detected and sent warning notifications to tens of thousand of companies with hundreds of thousands of invoices that have been defined to contain signs of the Value Added Tax (VAT) avoidance worth over 400 billion dong. At the same time, companies have been reported to self-adjust and pay more than 200 billion dong of VAT to the State Budget.

According to Ha Noi Department of Customs, the IT based collating of invoices has supported and provided both tax staff and enterprises with the application in terms of collating invoices of companies who quit their transaction addresses for preventing invalid invoice usage in the most effective manner.

Notably, Ha Noi Department of Tax has detected and referred cases to investigation units and provided information for fact-finding of big gangs that have established companies to sell invoices illegally. Such as the case of Nguyen Truong who set up 16 companies; the case of Dinh Thi Van having established 6 companies; the case of Le Van La and Nguyen Thi Dau who set up 08 companies to purchase and sell illegally invoices, the case of Trinh Thi Loi and Pham Thi Phuong on illegal sale of invoices, or the recent case of Tran Van Toan and his colleagues who have been prosecuted by the police for their acts of tax avoidance and selling invoices…The tax administration has been closely working with Ha Noi Police to further investigate and prosecute companies that have bought and used invalid invoices.

In order to stop tax fraud, Ha Noi has established a anti-violation team to look at invoices. The team will be in charge of studying violation acts; proposing measures; extending training courses to key inspectors and tax examination staff to control doubted invoices, developing principles and processes for uniform treatment of invalid invoices.

In addition, the Department of Tax has controlled invalid invoices through its application of searching invoices of companies that got removed their trading addresses; sending warnings to the companies that are suspected of involvement in tax and invoice related breaches on the tax administration’s website, assessing risk levels of suspects to control invoice usage, cross-checking the entire invoices kept by the Tax Department.

For countering cheats in VAT drawback, the Tax Department is proactive to change drawback examination methods under Tax administration which would clarify and track input invoices from the first sellers in the invoice supply chain.

In parallel, Ha Noi Department of Tax is actively deploying the pilot project of applying e-invoice coded by tax administrations under Decision No. 1209/QD-BTC dated June 23, 2015 by the Ministry of Finance. The regulations are binding goods selling and service supplying companies which are selected by tax administrations for issuing e-invoices with certified codes by tax administrations. The traders are encouraged to use this kind of invoices for tax-payers facilitation, minimizing administrative formalities and contributing to prevent illegal sales of invoices.

To fight the foresaid infringement in invoices in particular and in taxation in general, Ha Noi Department of Tax has strengthened the collaboration with internal inspectors, specialized inspection units, Governmental Inspectors, State Auditors, Police…to struggle against the failures of revenue collection, detecting, preventing and handling tax fraud and tax avoidance, particularly invalid invoices purchase and usage in a timely manner.

Especially, the Tax Department has implemented the program “Emails to tax payers for information exchange”. Tax administrations would send monthly emails to companies for exchanging in tax policies, tax debts, invoices usage, which help address the failures of revenue collection, assisting enterprises and enhancing tax management activities.