Tax sector has more modern tools to deal effectively with e-invoice fraud

Mr Mai Xuan Thanh, Acting Director of the General Department of Taxation, chaired the conference. Photo: TCT

According to the General Department of Taxation, electronic invoices are a trend in modern society, and the implementation has achieved positive results. Up to now, over 4 billion e-invoices have been issued. However, in recent times, through monitoring, the General Department of Taxation has found that there has been a phenomenon of some organizations and individuals cheating in issuing and using e-invoices to appropriate tax money.

Facing that situation, the General Department of Taxation has deployed the Electronic Invoice Database Center to analyze e-invoice data, serving the risk management of e-invoices in the whole tax industry.

Speaking at the ceremony, Mr Mai Xuan Thanh, Acting Director of the General Department of Taxation, said that the implementation of this application system is to help tax officials and employees in the management of electronic invoices, on that basis, helping tax officials and civil servants have tools and data sources to focus on reviewing, analyzing and detecting signs of risks in the issuance and use of electronic invoices; thereby preventing and promptly handling following the law for cases of invoice violations as well as acts of fraud, tax evasion, incorrect VAT refund, contributing to enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of tax management results, creating a healthy and equal business environment.

According to Mr Mai Xuan Thanh, currently taking advantage of social networking sites, groups have been set up with hundreds of people working in accounting and business management to sell and confidentially exchange e-invoices publicly.

Therefore, the tax sector can fully identify this situation through measures at the reporting base and this system and will deploy many similar systems to be more proactive in preventing e-invoice fraud.

"The volume of participants in buying and selling e-invoices is very large, forcing us to have a tool like this," said Mai Xuan Thanh. At the conference, a representative of the Risk Management Board, the General Department of Taxation, informed about important features of the system, such as controlling e-invoice data, evaluating according to a set of invoice risk criteria, and applying Advanced analytics in invoice management.

In particular, with the application of advanced analysis in invoice management, specifically identifying unusual purchase prices, artificial intelligence technology is applied to natural language analysis, identifying invoices for purchase and sale of the same type of goods, thereby determining invoices with unusual purchase and sale prices.

With billions of invoices with various goods and services, when it is necessary to focus on controlling key risky goods, the tool will help tax authorities filter key purchases and sales invoices for in-depth analysis.

With the feature of identifying the chain of businesses that have a transaction, the system will chain businesses with a transaction of the same type of item, looking for chains with unusual characteristics such as chains with the same beginning and ending nodes, chains of only buying, not selling; chains that many businesses leave their business locations to find clues of suspected illegal invoice trading, helping tax authorities to trace the origin of goods and the added value between stages.

To compare electronic invoice data with tax declarations, the system will do it automatically after the 5th day from the due date to submit the declaration. The result of the reconciliation between the declaration and the invoice is a "List of taxpayers with data on the difference between the declared value and the actual value on the issued invoice". Based on that list, the tax authority shall take appropriate professional measures (inspection at the desk, inspection, examination at the taxpayer's office; the essential cases are transferred to investigating agency) to assess taxpayers' compliance and implementation of tax laws.

Mr Mai Xuan Thanh affirmed that the tax sector continues to propagate warnings to businesses to prevent and prevent the use of illegal invoices early and remotely proactively implement professional measures and strengthen coordination with competent agencies in e-invoice management.