My name is Duong. I'm a Tax Partner of KPMG Vietnam. I've been working on corporate tax and I'm the Head of Global Transfer Pricing Services for the Vietnam firm. I've been working on a number of sectors including diversified industrials, consumer markets and a little bit of financial services and energy and natural resources.
Key issues
Vietnam is an exciting place. We're going through quite a number of significant trends. The tax reform strategy for the next five years has been approved by the Prime Minister. The tax weather in Vietnam is actively carrying on a tax audit basically trying to protect tax base. So, looking forward we're going to see a significant number of trends in tax legislation in relation to corporate income tax, federal tax and excise duties and we are going to see under the tax reform strategy the introduction of a number of new rules on complex transaction like thin capitalization, advance pricing arrangement and business restructuring.
Challenges
The business environment is clearly growing, getting more interesting and the challenge for foreign companies doing business in Vietnam is basically understanding and applying those new rules in the context of the investment in Vietnam and clearly the tax law has been changing and keeps changing over the next five to 10 years and thus clearly presenting a challenge for foreign companies in relation to their investment in Vietnam.
Growth drivers
Vietnam is actually growing in context of more and more complex reason. I'm talking about Asia Pacific and we are having a network of over 50 effective double tax treaties. Quite a number of important free trade agreements within ASEAN, with Japan, with China, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and we are seeing pricing implementation of those free trade agreements and those are clearly presenting quite a number of significant trends for the trade flows into Vietnam.