According to the report of the Committee for National Defense and Security about the draft Law on network security, which was introduced in the meeting of the National Assembly on April 4, until now Google and Facebook have not had any official representative in Vietnam yet.
As a result, regarding their online advertising activities, tax authorities can only collect tax from revenues earned by their Vietnamese partners / advertising agencies or direct service buyers which are based in Vietnam.
Preliminary statistics show that in 2016, on behalf of Google, YouTube, and Facebook, domestic companies paid a tax amount of about VND46.86billion (approx. $2.05million), consisting of VND25.28billion ($1.1million) of value added tax and VND21.58billion ($946,138) of corporate income tax.
In the first 9 months of 2017, on behalf of those companies, domestic companies also paid a tax amount of VND73.2billion ($3.2million), including VND39.08billion ($1.71million) value added tax and VND34.12billion ($1.5million) of corporate income tax.
Regarding the request of having an official representative office in Vietnam and data storage about Vietnamese users (a section in the draft Law), the Committee for National Defense and Security shared that statistics of the Ministry of Public Security displayed a very strong foundation of these companies in Vietnam.
In particular, until January 2018, in reality, Google and Facebook have hired 1.781 servers and 441 servers of Vietnamese businesses respectively in order to store data of users in the country.
Despite this fact, the tax amount that those foreign companies paid to the government is considered not adequate.
