The Ho Chi Minh City Tax Department has established a team to exploit the list of famous individuals and content creators to conduct tax law compliance checks.
Responding to the issue of tax inspections of celebrities, Mr. Mai Son, Deputy Director General of the General Department of Taxation (Ministry of Finance) emphasized that according to legal regulations, all businesses, organizations, and individuals, regardless of celebrities, if they have conditional business transactions, must self-declare, self-pay, and be responsible to the state budget.
“Tax authorities are responsible for propaganda, support as well as having solutions to inspect and handle violations if any to ensure fairness and transparency with taxpayers,” Mr. Son emphasized.
According to the representative of the General Department of Taxation, in recent times, with the group of famous people participating in livestream, affiliate marketing sales… the tax authority has had solutions, directed agencies at all levels to have measures to strengthen management. Including propaganda, support, building an e-commerce network for domestic individuals, accompanying guidance documents… to ensure there is enough database of these taxpayers.
According to Mr. Mai Son, recently, the tax authorities have focused on Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City because these are two localities with strong development in services, entertainment, culture, business and e-commerce. Ho Chi Minh City has implemented the plan and initially has data on famous people with e-commerce activities and will put them under inspection in 2025.
Specifically, on December 24, 2024, the Ho Chi Minh City Tax Department said that it had established a team to exploit the list of individuals who are celebrities, content creators (YouTubers, TikTokers, KOCs, KOSs, KOLs) and individuals selling livestream products on social networking platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, YouTube… to conduct tax law compliance checks.
The tax authority has also issued a plan to conduct tax audits on individuals who are celebrities and digital influencers with income from e-commerce activities, salaries and wages. In the first phase, the pilot was conducted for 35 individuals who are artists and celebrities, many of whom declared and paid over 1 billion VND/person.
According to the report of the General Department of Taxation, in 2024, tax collection from organizations and individuals with domestic e-commerce business activities will reach 116,000 billion VND, an increase of 20% over the same period in 2023.
On December 19, 2024, the Tax sector deployed the Electronic Information Portal for households and individuals conducting e-commerce business activities with basic features such as: tax registration, declaration, tax payment, lookup; instructions for use, receiving feedback from taxpayers; automating and integrating detailed instructions on how to fulfill tax obligations, collecting and building a database of households and individuals doing business as well as automatically calculating tax rates based on the revenue declared by taxpayers, helping businesses easily monitor, grasp the amount of tax payable and proactively fulfill their obligations to the state budget.