Following the rapid shift from a presumptive tax to a mechanism of self-declaration and e-invoices, tax policy for business households needs adjustment to better suit the operational reality of a very specialized sector.

VietNamNet has published a series of articles approaching the issue from three angles: compliance costs at the household business level, the operation of the management system, and recommendations for current policy design.

First, a simple question must be asked: How much cost does the management system bear when applying the new tax mechanism to business households?

Reports showed that about 1,770,080 business households with annual revenue above VND500 million are the taxpayers required to fully implement declaration and e-invoice requirements.

Assuming each household generates around 100 transactions per day, the system would need to process roughly 177 million transactions daily, or about 64.6 billion transactions per year, a figure that the tax system has never handled in real time before.

At this level, the issue no longer lies in individual transactions but the aggregate volume processed daily.

Even at a minimal cost per transaction, covering infrastructure, data storage, bandwidth, security, and operations, estimated at VND100–300, total annual operating costs would range from VND6.46 trillion in a low scenario to VND19.38 trillion in a high scenario.

In other words, while each transaction costs only a few hundred dong, multiplying that by tens of billions quickly turns system operation into a major expense.

If we place this figure in correlation with the budget revenue from the business household sector, about VND25,953 billion in 2024 and an estimated over VND31,000 billion in 2025, the scale of the cost becomes quite clear.

With the 2024 collection level, system operating costs are equivalent to 1/4 of the revenue in the low scenario, and could reach nearly 3/4 of the revenue in the high scenario.

Even taking the higher collection level of 2025, this cost still accounts for about 1/5 to more than half of the total revenue.

Simply put, for every VND10 collected from the business household sector, the system may have to spend from VND2 to VND6 just to maintain that collection. This is no longer a supplementary cost, but a significant portion of the very revenue the system generates.

This excludes salaries, bonuses, and other expenses for tax officials.

But the story does not end with the system's costs.

With 1.77 million business households, compliance costs at the household level, including accounting, technology, time, and transition costs, typically range from VND40 million to VND90 million per year.

For the entire sector, this total cost could reach about VND70,803 billion in a low scenario and VND159,307 billion in a high scenario.

Placing the compliance costs of business households and management agencies side by side, the scale of the problem becomes clearer: compliance cost is a major burden at the level of the entire economy.

From a broader perspective, this is not just a story about money but also about resource allocation.

When a massive volume of data must be processed daily, the resources of management agencies are spread thin to maintain system operations, instead of focusing on areas with higher risks or greater management value.

The question, therefore, is not whether technology can scale - it can - but whether policy should require processing such volumes in the first place, and whether the costs are justified by the benefits.

In this context, system compliance costs are no longer a secondary consideration but a core variable in tax policy, one that, if overlooked, could distort the assessment of overall effectiveness.

Ultimately, when the cost of collecting tax consumes a large share of the revenue itself, the real question is no longer how much is collected, but how much value actually remains.

Tu Giang - Lan Anh