Preventing revenue loss is associated with nurturing long-term revenue sources.

Discussing in the hall on October 30 about the implementation situation in 2025 and the state budget estimate for 2026, National Assembly deputies highly appreciated the Government's direction and management of budget collection with quite high results. However, deputies also suggested that there should be measures to prevent tax losses and improve revenue management; preventing tax losses should be associated with nurturing long-term revenue sources.

Preventing revenue loss is associated with nurturing long-term revenue sources - Photo 1.

Delegate Ha Sy Dong, National Assembly Delegation of Quang Tri Province

Review projects and prioritize

Delegate Pham Thi Thanh Mai ( Hanoi ) pointed out a very alarming situation, which is that fraud and tax evasion leading to loss of state budget revenue are happening more and more sophisticatedly and complicatedly.

Appreciating the Government's close direction on strengthening the fight against tax fraud, delegate Pham Thi Thanh Mai also pointed out related difficulties such as e-commerce platform business, the "online, livestream" sales situation of KOLs (influencers).

“Only when the police got involved did we see that the goods were both counterfeit, fake, and of poor quality, and tax evasion. That not only affected the budget but also the economy, and affected trust, because it was unfair competition with legitimate businesses,” the delegate analyzed.

On that basis, delegate Pham Thi Thanh Mai suggested that, along with measures to combat tax losses, there should be solutions to solve the problem at its root. That is to make competition healthy, ensure the origin and source of goods are clear and evaluate the value of goods correctly.

Delegate Ha Sy Dong (Quang Tri) said that 2025 is the final year of the 2021-2025 medium-term financial, budget and public investment plan, and is also a pivotal year to enter the new development phase 2026-2030. In the context of many fluctuations in the domestic and international economy, the management of the budget, public investment and national finance has achieved many remarkable results, contributing to maintaining macroeconomic stability, controlling inflation, ensuring social security and maintaining reasonable growth momentum.

However, delegates emphasized that a deeper look shows a number of issues that need to be analyzed and handled at a strategic level to create a solid fiscal foundation for the coming period.

Specifically, it is necessary to see that the current budget revenue and expenditure structure is still unsustainable. The increase in budget revenue in recent years is mainly due to a number of situational factors, which have not yet formed a long-term driving force. New revenue sources from the digital economy, e-commerce, and cross-border services have not been effectively exploited. Revenue from equitization and divestment of state capital is still very low, while regular expenditure still accounts for a high proportion. Saving 10% of regular expenditure is mainly through cutting tasks from technological innovation, process reform or streamlining and streamlining the apparatus. Therefore, delegates emphasized the need to shift the focus from revenue to strengthening sustainable revenue by reforming tax policies, improving revenue management, preventing revenue loss and nurturing long-term revenue sources.

Need to increase deficit and increase investment to achieve higher growth rate

Emphasizing that the effective construction and implementation of fiscal policies in recent times have contributed significantly to maintaining macroeconomic stability, helping our country's economy overcome unprecedented difficulties and challenges to achieve very positive results, and this is also the basis for planning strategies for national development in the coming term with greater goals, delegate Tran Van Lam (Bac Ninh) said that in macroeconomic factors, the deficit and public debt indexes in recent years have always been guaranteed to be lower than planned, this is a great success in the Government's management. On this basis, in the coming time, it is necessary to increase deficit and increase investment to achieve a higher growth rate.

In the coming term, as the country will implement many important national projects requiring huge investment resources, expanding the budget deficit and increasing public debt to increase investment resources is an objective need.

However, this expansion of fiscal policy needs to be considered, calculated, and weighed carefully, along with improving the quality and efficiency of investment, in which weaknesses in all stages of the investment sector need to be promptly overcome, from selecting investment projects that are truly necessary and have the potential to support sustainable economic growth to the stages of project preparation, investment preparation, and organization and implementation of disbursement to bring capital sources to early effectiveness, minimizing waste due to slow disbursement.

Only then can the pressure on budget deficit and public debt be relieved, macro balances be firmly ensured, and economic growth truly go into depth, quality, and sustainability.

Regarding the budget estimate, delegate Tran Van Lam proposed that in the next term, research should be done to innovate the budget estimate stage to both set the budget at a safe and highly feasible level, and at the same time determine the reserve level for excess revenue if favorable conditions allow.

In addition to the revenue estimate, the expenditure estimate must also be established immediately. The expenditure estimate must be built synchronously and correspondingly to have a plan to arrange and use the excess revenue for tasks and projects in the order of priority established from the beginning. This will improve the efficiency of budget use and also reduce concerns about high and low in the stage of making and approving the annual budget estimate.

Improve the quality of revenue forecasting

The relatively high budget revenue is very positive, reflecting the effectiveness of the direction and management. However, delegate Pham Van Hoa (Dong Thap) said that the low budget revenue estimate shows that the budget revenue forecast assessment is not close to reality. The 2025 revenue estimate is lower than the 2024 implementation, so it needs to be considered and solutions should be found to build a suitable and authentic revenue estimate to improve the quality of forecasting work to be relatively accurate and more practical.

"Exceeding the budget revenue is a good thing for the growth target, but if the revenue is too high, we need to review our budgeting work. If the central budget is low, the local budget will also be low to exceed the revenue, tax arrears increased by more than 17% compared to the same period, higher than the set target. We request the Ministry of Finance to have drastic solutions to speed up the collection and handling of arrears to reduce the debt to the extent possible. At the same time, there are effective measures to prevent tax losses in all areas.

The policy of tax exemption, reduction and debt forgiveness for enterprises is very necessary when enterprises are facing difficulties to demonstrate humanity, but it is also necessary to be resolute in other cases where conditions are met but they are stubborn or evasive," said delegate Pham Van Hoa (Dong Thap). He also proposed that the Government and the Ministry of Finance resolutely recover capital from places that slow down disbursement progress, and prioritize capital allocation for places that do well in disbursement to invest in necessary projects that have not been allocated capital, causing a waste of resources.

In addition to the achieved results, National Assembly deputies: Tran Anh Tuan (Ho Chi Minh City); Tran Van Tien (Phu Tho) commented: the implementation of the 2025 budget still revealed many shortcomings and limitations and suggested that effective measures should be taken to handle them in the coming time because the preparation of budget revenue estimates that are not close to reality has affected the budget balance and investment plans for the year.

In addition, during the discussion, many delegates also expressed their interest and contributed their opinions on issues related to the process of preparing and implementing state budget estimates; the issue of innovation in public investment capital management; the issue of innovation in thinking about public financial management, national financial management, etc.

Hai Lien

Source: https://baochinhphu.vn/chong-that-thu-gan-voi-nuoi-duong-nguon-thu-lau-dai-102251030165401743.htm