State revenue targets among Customs Departments are always adjusted

	Collect State Revenue in Ha Giang Customs: Strongly affected from business operation
	Customs effectively deploys the fight against state revenue loss
	Localities strengthen measures to combat State revenue loss

The Press Conference. Photo: T. Trang

The Conference was chaired by the Director of Import and Export Duties Department, Luu Manh Tuong and was attended by more than 50 press agencies.

Giving an overall assessment on the state budget collection of the Customs sector, Mr. Tuong said that in 2018, the Customs was assigned an estimated target of State budget revenue of VND 283,000 billion by the National Assembly, Government and the Ministry and the desired target of VND 293,000 billion by the Ministry of Finance. To date, the Customs sector has completed the ordinance target of VND 284,202 billion.

According to Tuong, the above result was due to objective factors, including some factors such as the economic growth rate in November 2018 and the development of production and business, in which the import and export turnover increased significantly compared to the same period in 2017.

Especially, petroleum had a great impact on the Customs revenue both in volume and value, which helped the Customs revenue from this commodity increase by about VND 20,000 billion compared to the estimate.

However, he also acknowledged factors causing the reduction in the Customs revenues. In 2018, due to serious impact by free trade agreements FTAs, the Customs revenue in the first eight months was only about VND 17,900 billion. The revenue from import tax, special consumption tax in the first nine months tended to decrease. Thank to a sharp decrease in import turnover (15%), the VAT also increased significantly (12.53%) compared to the same period in 2017, which made the total budget revenue of the sector still increase compared to the same period last year.

Moreover, the subjective factor of the Customs authorities , from the beginning of the year, the General Department of Customs issued a Directive of the Director-General on the performance of state budget task in 2018, in which focusing on two important solutions which were facilitation to the import and export activities and active application of measures for anti-state revenue losses.

Mr. Tuong affirmed that the Customs would try its best to achieve the desired target assigned by the Ministry of Finance.

At the conference, the questions by reporters about how many Customs Department complete the state budget targets, how did the state revenue targets allocate to municipal and provincial Customs Department when there was a difference among units which has completed the targets and units which has not completed the targets; the difficulties in the tax debt collection of Customs from enterprises which were escaped. Regarding this e-tax payment program, the reporters put questions why there were 24 banks join in e-tax payment 24/7? How much was the state revenue from the e-tax payment 24/7?

Answering the reporter's question about the allocation of state revenue targets to local customs units and to units which have completed the targets and the units which have not completed the targets, Mr. Tuong said that currently, 27/35 customs departments have completed the state revenue targets. However, the Import-Export Duties Department always assess the situation of collection and give continuous adjustment as well as assign additional desired targets to Customs units which have completed the assigned targets in order to ensure the total revenue of the whole sector.

Regarding the collection of outstanding debts, Mr. Tuong said that until November 30th, 2018, the Customs collected VND1,425.7 billion of tax debts and tax debts arising in 2018 was not significant. Now, the tax debts of the Customs sector was much lower than the total revenue and the debt rate of 5% assigned by the Government. However, the customs sector also encountered many difficulties in recovering tax debts from enterprises which were escaped.

Therefore, in order to handle outstanding debts, the Customs sector has classified the debts. The Customs will assign the revenue target for recoverable debts and monitor and complete dossier for management of irrecoverable debts to make debt write-off for eligible debts.

Answering the question of why there were only 24 banks joining in e-tax payment 24/7, Mr. Tuong said that up to now, there are 2,151 enterprises implementing e-tax payment 24/7, the revenue from e-tax payment 24/7 was VND14,163 billion with 83,160 transactions. Although the revenue was not high, the e-tax payment 24/7 helped enterprises pay taxes anywhere, anytime by all means.

Collect State Revenue in Ha Giang Customs: Strongly affected by business operation

Currently, there are 24 banks joining in the e-tax payment 24/7 because the participation in this program requires banks to upgrade their portals to meet transaction conditions. Therefore, in the coming time, the General Department of Customs will continue to encourage banks to join the e-tax payment 24/7 program to facilitate the taxpayers, accordingly, the Customs will encourage foreign banks to serve foreign companies.

Questions raised at the press conference were fully and carefully answered by the representative of the Import and Export Duties Department