Bird’s nest firm issues $1.4 bln worth securities invoices within a week

A firm trading in bird’s nest issued invoices worth VND34 trillion ($1.44 billion) in just seven days, almost all of them for the stock market, HCMC tax officials said Wednesday.

Dang Khac Phuc, director of Binh Thanh district's tax department, revealed this information at a review meeting, adding that such abnormalities indicated the practice of issuing invoices illegally to reap big profits.

"When checking, the tax sector discovered that bills for the bird’s nest business were worth just VND40 million ($1,690), the rest were invoices for the stock market," Phuc said.

Binh Thanh district has more than 22,000 businesses and over 16,000 business households and individuals. Therefore, a very large number of invoices are issued. However, it has been noticed recently that the number of invoices issued by some businesses were abnormally large.

In one year after they were introduced, more than 17 million e-invoices with authentication codes and 450,000 without codes were used in HCMC.

"The number of e-invoices is very large for a variety of industries, indicating multiple risks," Phuc said.

Phi Van Tuan, deputy director of the General Department of Taxation, said at the meeting that the tax sector needs to disseminate information and make businesses more aware of tax evasion and its implications.

Tax authorities will coordinate with the police to investigate cases related to illegal invoice trading, he added.

For the short-term, senior tax department officials are preparing plans for dealing with businesses using invoices from 524 "ghost" companies.

The meeting also heard that the city's budget revenue reached VND164.29 trillion ($6.95 billion) in the first six months of this year, fulfilling nearly 51% of the annual plan, but down more than 5% over the same period last year.

In the first half of 2023, the city’s tax department carried out 5,907 inspections at enterprises and examined 47,373 tax declaration dossiers. Officials concluded that more than VND6.87 trillion ($290.5 million) of tax dues remained to be collected.

The municipal tax department said that it has strengthened the work of reviewing and tackling the illegal trade in buying and selling invoices.

In the first six months of 2023, the department issued notices to more than 21,000 businesses to review and clarify the use of invoices as part of investigating the illegal purchase and sale of invoices.