Hanoi (VNS/VNA) - E-commerce platforms may choose not to declare andpay tax on behalf of sellers.

Thisis new information as per Circular 100 issued by the Ministry of Finance,replacing the previous Circular 40.

Thisregulation will help e-commerce platforms to relieve their finances.

However,a representative of the General Department of Taxation said that although itwould not be compulsory for e-commerce platforms to pay tax on behalf ofsellers, Circular 100 still had strict regulations to avoid loss of taxrevenue.

Circular100 gives e-commerce platform owners two choices. One is to pay taxeson behalf of individuals if authorised by sellers.

Thesecond is for platforms to provide the information of business individuals,such as the name, age, address, tax number, telephone number, salesrevenue and bank account number, to the tax authority.

TaThi Phuong Lan, Deputy Director of the Individual Income Tax ManagementDepartment, said that between the two options above, the plan to pay taxes onbehalf of individuals would be more favourable for e-commerce platforms.Because the plan to share the seller's information with the tax agencywould take much time and manpower.

“Ifdeclaring or paying tax on behalf of sellers, e-commerce stores only have to doit monthly or quarterly and can do it all at once. Thus, the exchangeswill not have to provide information,” she said.

Ifproviding seller information, the platform will have to provide informationon each transaction, but the number of e-commerce transactions iscurrently up to 3.5 million transactions per day, according to Lan.

Thedata is very large, it will consume a lot of human and material costs comparedto declaring or submitting instead.

Recently,the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Industry and Trade signed anagreement on sharing data on e-commerce platforms and information aboutindividuals selling on them.

Circular100 will take effect from January 1, next year and is a legal corridor tomanage tax obligations for sellers on e-commerce platforms, helping to limitthe loss of tax revenue on current e-commerce platforms.

Areport by the Vietnam E-commerce Association revealed that the averagegrowth rate of Vietnamese e-commerce was forecast to be 29 per centin the 2020 - 2025 period, with the scale estimated to be 52 billion USD by2025.

Withan increasingly large scale, tax revenue from e-commerce issignificant and Circular 100 will contribute to combat tax losses./.