VietNamNet Bridge – A series of big enterprises, the biggest cheeses in the national economy, have one after another asked for the permission to delay the tax payment or reduce tax rates.

Enterprises queue up with proposals for tax reductions

The Ministry of Finance (MOF) has issued the Circular No. 124 on lowering the export tariff on coal exports. Since September 1, the export tariff has been cut from 13 percent to 10 percent.

As such, only after two months of raising the tariff on coal exports from 10 percent to 13 percent, the government has to “climb down,” cutting down the tariff again to 10 percent.

Prior to that, the Vietnam Coal and Mineral Industries Group repeatedly asked the government to cut down the export tariff, warning that the amount of coal consumed in the first seven months of the year was 23.7 million tons only, or 55 percent of the yearly plan was fulfilled, while a gloomy picture has been predicted for the export in the last months of the year.

MOF just made the decision on cutting the tariff on coal exports when it received the proposal from rubber enterprises to exempt the tax on rubber exports. The document with the signature of the Rubber Association Tran Ngoc Thuan said that the white gold producers have been meeting big difficulties.

The document said the profits made by rubber enterprises are lower than the bank loan interest rates. Some enterprises have to scale down their production and export. The natural rubber output in the first six months of the year decreased by 4.4 percent in comparison with the same period of the last year, which led to the 19.5 percent decrease in the rubber export turnover.

Since March 2011, the rubber prices have been decreasing continuously. In July 2013, Vietnam’s rubber was traded at $2,198 per ton, which was nearly close to the production cost.

The profits have been lowered to 2-5 percent, while the same export tariff has been applied since February 2011, when the rubber export price reached its peak of $4,562 which brought fat profit to exporters.

The military telecom group Viettel, which has been well known as a big conglomerate of the national economy with the profits of tens of billions of dong, the leader in the Vietnam’s telecom industry, surprisingly also asked for the 5-year export tax exemption.

In the document to the Prime Minister, Viettel asked for the permission to exempt the import tax on the materials, supporting parts to be used for the R&D, manufacturing and assembling of mobile phones, no matter if the imports can be made domestically.

The beneficiaries are the holding company, Viettel, and the subsidiaries where it holds 100 percent of chartered capital. The tax exemption, if approved, would be valid for five years, from 2013 to the end of 2017.

Besides, Viettel also asked for the preferential 10 percent corporate income tax on the income from selling mobile products made by Viettel domestically.

The enterprises in difficulties still make fat profits

While other big enterprises still don’t know if their proposals can be met, Truong Hai Automobile, the big guy in the domestic automobile industry, has got what it wanted--reasoning the big difficulties it is meeting.

However, the automobile manufacturer has reported the big profit of 400 percent over 2012. The enterprise has announced that it would pay the dividend at 10 percent, or VND325 billion, which is equal to ¼ of the sum of tax that the company can delay the payment for one year.

PLVN