Hanoi (VNS/VNA) - Vietnamese e-commerce is growing,creating many opportunities to generate jobs, develop the private sectoreconomy and increase revenue for the State budget. However,preventing tax losses in this business requires improving mechanisms andpolicies.

Data published by theVietnam E-commerce and Digital Economy Agency (IDEA), Ministry of Industry andTrade, showed that the average growth rate of retail e-commerce revenue reached17% per year in 2020 and last year, with total revenue of 13.7 billion USD,accounting for 7% of sales of consumer goods and services nationwide last year.

In particular, thepandemic period has helped create online shopping habits, especially inbig cities.

Lai Viet Anh, IDEA’sdeputy director, said that the growth rate of Vietnam's e-commerce is forecastto reach about 17 – 20% this year, bringing retail e-commerce revenueto over 16 billion USD, which is expected to account for about 7.5% ofsales of consumer goods and services nationwide.

Economic experts saidthat given the growth of e-commerce transactions, stricter tax collectionmanagement both in breadth and depth for this type of business is necessary.

E-commerce transactionscan be done between business to business, between businesses andindividuals, and between individuals and individuals.

However, the nature ofe-commerce is that there is no transaction office, no paper-based transactions,and some of the goods exchanged in the transaction are intangible goods such asdigital products.

Therefore, transactionsin e-commerce are often difficult to control, manage, monitor, and accessinformation on, according to Anh.

In addition, taxevasion is more frequent and common, causing difficulties for taxadministration, and the annual budget can lose a significant amount frome-commerce.

In order to improve theeffectiveness of tax administration for e-commerce activities, a representativeof the National Institute for Finance (Ministry of Finance) said that it isnecessary to ensure the principle of fairness between the traditionalbusiness and e-commerce business.

In particular, taxmechanisms and policies must create favourable conditions for e-commerceactivities to develop, without creating barriers for consumers.

“Tax policy fore-commerce should be simple, easy to implement and reduce compliance costs forbusinesses, on the one hand, and not become a barrier to the developmentof the digital economy in general and e-commerce in particular, on the otherhand, while still ensuring correct and sufficient tax collection for the Statebudget," said the representative. /.