Although it is not compulsory for companies to declare taxes online instead of physically going to the tax offices, some tax agencies have reportedly forced them to do so by threatening that they will otherwise inspect their operations. H., director of a commercial company based in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 1, said she was offered two choices when submitting a tax application to the district’s tax agency. “In the first option I will have to work in person with the tax officers to clarify all of the value-added tax receipts I have declared in the year to October,” she told Tuoi Tre. In the second choice H. would only have to commit to declare taxes online, and there would be no meeting with the officials in the second choice, she said. “Of course I chose the less complicated one – declaring taxes via the agency website. “But what displeased me is the fact that I was forced to declare taxes online while it’s not an obliged regulation,” she decried.‘Good for companies’ Dang Khac Phuc, head of the District 1 tax agency, said it is good for businesses to declare taxes online as they can just stay at home to complete the procedure. “It will save time and traveling cost,” he told Tuoi Tre. Phuc also asserted that the agency has no policy to inspect businesses if they do not complete the declaration online. The HCMC Tax Agency aims to have 70 percent of the city-based businesses complete online tax declarations this year, and 80 to 90 percent in June 2013, Phuc said. Duong The Quang, director of the taxpayer information center under the agency, said there is no regulation that obligates businesses to complete the online procedure, but only encourages them to change the habit. “The Internet-based declaration will reduce personal interaction between taxpayers and officials, hence preventing corruption,” he added. Some 90,000 companies in the city have declared taxes online, according to figures from the municipal tax agency. Statistics also reveal that the city has had to earmark VND180 billion (US$8.58 billion), excluding payment for the workforce, over the past few years only to receive and store more than 600 million sheets of declaration forms from the traditional declaration method. Taxpayers meanwhile said the tax agency’s Internet-based infrastructure for online declaration is still problematic. “The website has repeatedly overloaded and incurred technical faults,” they said.