Businesses confused about new regulations in Vietnam

Businesses confused about new regulations in Vietnam

The business registration division of the HCM City Planning and Investment Department has been overloaded for several days answering questions about new procedures to set up new businesses under the amended Enterprise and Investment Laws which took effect one week ago.

A businessman told reporters that the procedures had not improved as expected.

Article No 29 of the 2014 Enterprise Law stipulates that there is need to write down business fields in business registration certificate.

However, the businesspeople said the provision can only help ease business registration agencies’ works, while businesses cannot benefit from this.

In fact, when registering, enterprises have to enumerate all of their business fields and then declare the encoded fields.

Le Duc Hien, the owner of a business reporters met at the HCM City Planning and Investment Department, complained that he le encountered trouble when adding one more business field to his business registration certificate.

Hien, after spending time checking legal documents, decided that the business field should be encoded as 6312. However, the agency refused his registration and said the business field should be 8299.

Nguyen Ngoc Tuan, director of Viet A Tax, Accountancy and Law Service JSC, also said that it was difficult for businesses to encode their business fields when making declarations.

“The problem is that we don’t have information about the codes of business fields. We have been told to check the list of business fields released by the General Statistics Office. However, it is really difficult to find the right ones among the thousands of codes given,” Tuan said.

“The work should be done by state’s officers rather than businesspeople,” one businessman said.

Most of the business people who were interviewed said they could not understand how the new law was ‘open’ and ‘clear’ as described by state agencies.

Lam Phong, who provides business registration service, said many new regulations remained enigmatic to businessmen.

The new law stipulates that businesses have the right to determine their stamps provided that they register the stamp samples on the national business information portal.

However, businesses cannot use their stamps immediately, but can only do so three days later.

Another businessman said he had to go to several places to ask about the procedures to change the business’s legal representatives.

“When I went to the investment division, I was told to go to the business registration division. But when I met an official of the business registration, I was told to go back to the investment division,” he said.

vietnamnews