The 2005 Commercial Law should be revised to prevent smuggling and trade fraud, experts said at a workshop to review the Law’s implementation, held on October 16 in Hanoi.
Dinh Thi My Loan, Chairwoman of the Vietnam Association of Retailers, said after 10 years of implementation, the law had become backward and could not catch up with new trade activities.
Notably, state agencies have not paid due attention to supervision and inspection activities to
prevent violations relating to foreign-invested enterprises, such as transfer pricing or prolonged losses.
With the strategy of cheap pricing and transfer pricing, several foreign-invested firms had been in unhealthy competition with domestic companies, Loan said, adding that the favoring of certain localities by foreign investors had been a big barrier for local investors, especially in land lease and investment procedures.
Lawyer Ngo Viet Hoa from the USAID Governance for Inclusive Growth program said that several provisions of the 2005 Commercial Law had not been applied in the last decade because they overlapped with other provisions of specialized laws.
The management of import and export activities had also seen certain shortcomings, Hoa said, noting that the loopholes in the law facilitated smuggling and trade fraud.
Hoa added most of the important provisions on trade policies had been found in guiding documents, but not in the law.
Tran Do Quyen, Deputy Director of the Department of Legal Affairs under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, proposed some provisions of the Commercial Law that needed revising, such as policies on state support for islands and remote areas, building commercial infrastructure nationwide, and modes of goods purchase and sale and distribution in the country.- (VLLF)
