From 2019, 100% of enterprises must use electronic invoices?

In the near future, business enterprises and organizations would not be entitled to use self-printed invoices.

The above information is one of the content in the Draft Decree on invoices for sale of goods and provision of services recently announced by the Ministry of Finance which is likely to be enacted in 2019 in replacement of Decree no.51/2010/ND-CP and Decree no.04/2014/ND-CP. The key aim of this Draft Decree is to develop and expand the use of electronic invoices(e-invoices) by restricting companies from using self-printed paper bills.

Accordingly, Tax Authorities shall take charge of printing invoices to sell them for new enterprises, household or individual businesses. Selling invoices for the new enterprises shall be implemented in the period of 6 months. During this period, the Tax Authorities shall support, guide the enterprises to apply their own e-invoices or  e-invoices with verification codes of Tax Authorities. In addition, the Draft Decree states that the Ministry of Finance is responsible for helping companies make the switch from paper invoices to e-invoices.

Regarding typical goods or sevices which stamps, ticket, cards are used as typical dominated invoices; companies are still eligible to self-print stamps, tickets, cards for use as current. The Ministry of Finance will draw up guidelines for some specific cases which need to use typical self-printed invoices. Supermarkets, shopping malls are allowed to keep using receipts printed directly by cashiers, but have to send the data to Tax Authorities periodly, then. 

About invoice mangement, the authorities have made consitent improvements for. In the past few years, one of the most impressive changes in this issue was that companies have been allowed to self-print invoices. Before that, they had to buy invoices from Tax Authorities. However, this change enables some people to take advantage of the facilitation of establishing enterprises specified in Vietnamese Enterprise Law to establish as well as purchase many enterprises. Although these enterprises don’t run any business, they still have the right to use invoices. They make use of this to profit themselves, receive reimbursement for overblown tax declaration and drain national budget.

The new Draft Decree on invoicing is expected to make a significant breakthrough in invoice management, to create national database of invoicing to prevent counterfeit invoices, non-existent invoices,... Therefore, illegal trade in invoices - an annoying issue for the past few years could be restrained.

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