VietNamNet Bridge – The owners of online shops on Facebook say they will close their shops if the Ministry of Finance (MOF) taxes their income.

Nguyen Thi Anh runs a street-facing shop on Hai Ba Trung Street in the central area of Hanoi, but also advertises his products on Facebook.

Anh admitted that Facebook is a good retail channel which brings considerable revenue, but he said he will stop the advertisement and sale on Facebook if MOF taxes him.

Nguyen Thi Phuong, an insurance agent in Nam Dinh City, said selling goods via Facebook is just “an extra job”, but brings stable income.

“I can sell about 10 products every day and make a profit of VND20,000-30,000 from every product sold,” she said.

Phuong noted that most of the “sellers on Facebook” are just “amateur merchants”, who do not have much capital and and can save money as don’t have to pay for retail premises.

“I believe they will close their shops if they have to pay tax,” Phuong said.

However, Phuong thinks that it would be very difficult for taxation bodies to tax the sales via Facebook.

“It is impossible to control all the petty merchants doing business on social networks,” she said.

A lawyer, though advocating MOF’s decision to impose tax on the business via Facebook, in order to create a fair playing field with other business, admitted that taxation would face “technical problems”.

Nguyen Van Tuan, a senior executive of VC Corp, an e-commerce service provider, noted that there is little information about the sellers and products one can find on Facebook pages.

“In many cases, there are only handphone numbers shown on the pages, while there is no information about discount rates, delivery and sale policies. Therefore, buyers face high risks when making online transactions,” he noted.

However, Tuan does not think imposing taxes on sales via Facebook would help settle the problem.

“It will be very difficult to tax petty merchants, who can play thousands of tricks to hide their real information,” he said.

Tuan said Facebook is a global social network which does not have a representative office in Vietnam and it does not have to adhere to Vietnamese laws on e-commerce.

Therefore, it is impossible to request Facebook to register the function as an e-commerce trading floor.

Lawyer Truong Thanh Duc from law firm Basico believes that it will be impossible to control sales on Facebook, and that MOF should not try to go through with such an effort.

Duy Anh