Nowhere to hide for online sellers as taxman catches up

The HCMC Tax Department for instance said at a forum Friday that it collected over VND8 billion ($342,759) each from two individuals last year and this year on their earnings from YouTube and TikTok.

In 2018 it collected VND4 billion from a man who earned VND41 billion from Google, it said.

It also found a person in Quang Nam Province earning nearly VND17 billion from Google and passed on his details to authorities there.

In 2017 it discovered a woman had sold cosmetics worth over VND499 billion through live streams between 2013 and 2016.

She had to pay over VND9 billion in taxes and fines.

An individual who supplied the goods to her had to pay over VND1.7 billion.

The Hanoi Tax Department said it has discovered at least 1,194 people with incomes from foreign entities like Google and Facebook and collected VND129.3 billion last year and VND134 billion in 2020 from them.

Last year it set up a database, which now has 32,084 online shops and 2,307 online property landlords, for collecting taxes.

There are 139 companies operating e-commerce platforms in Vietnam, and they record an average of 3.5 million visits a day, according to the General Department of Taxation.