How to get automatic tax refund, how long to receive money?

tax refund - Photo 1.

People do tax procedures at the Ho Chi Minh City Tax Department - Photo: TTD

In recent days, personal income tax (PIT) refunds have become a hot topic on social networks with a series of questions being asked such as how to get a refund on the eTax Mobile app, how to do it, and most of all, how long does it take to receive the money...?

Many taxpayers are also concerned about how the excess personal income tax paid in previous years will be resolved, and whether it will be automatically refunded on the eTax Mobile app after years of hardship without a refund.

Meanwhile, information from the Tax Department said that electronic personal income tax refund has only been implemented for tax refund dossiers in 2024.

How long will it take to receive my personal income tax refund?

Taking a photo of the message "The tax authority has accepted the electronic tax declaration form 02" on April 4, Ms. My Huyen posted it on her personal page and asked "When will I receive the decision and tax refund, everyone?".

In response, many of My Huyen's friends said they also submitted their applications on April 3, were accepted on April 4, but as of April 13, "still haven't heard anything?".

Ms. Ngan - a taxpayer - said that according to regulations, a refund is issued within 6 working days from the date the tax authority accepts the tax refund application, but after waiting for dozens of days without seeing any results, she is quite impatient.

Asking for information to know how long or how quickly a tax refund will take depends on "luck". Places with many applications will wait longer, sometimes months, while places with few applications will only wait a few days.

In fact, when the "trend" of personal income tax refunds was popular on social networks in recent days, many people shared screenshots of their eTax Mobile accounts "showing off" their first automatic tax refund.

There are cases where people are happy because they receive their tax refund in their account after a few days, but there are also cases where "they see people refunding their taxes loudly but they don't see anything yet".

There are also cases where the application was returned due to errors. Notably, from downloading the eTax Mobile app to automatically refund personal income tax, many cases discovered that they still had tens of millions of tax refunds due to the accumulation of the past 5 years, or there were cases where the income was falsely declared up to hundreds of millions of dong.

According to Mr. Mai Son, Deputy Director of the Tax Department, the automatic tax refund system synthesizes taxpayer information from the database of income paying agencies, tax declaration data of individuals and data from the national population database.

From there, the tax authority application will automatically create a suggested personal income tax settlement declaration, pre-filling tax refund information for the taxpayer.

"Taxpayers only need to access the eTax Mobile application to confirm the information. When the taxpayer confirms, the system automatically creates a tax refund decision and creates a refund order to transmit information to the State Treasury, before refunding the tax to the taxpayer" - Mr. Mai Son said and recommended that taxpayers quickly install the eTax Mobile application on their mobile phones to receive an automatic personal income tax refund, saving time by not having to go to the tax office to complete the tax refund procedure.

tax refund - Photo 2.

People hope that personal income tax refunds on the eTax Mobile app will be more convenient and faster - Photo: NAM TRAN

Will the excess tax paid in previous years be automatically refunded?

Reporting to the Ministry of Finance, Mr. PVV (HCMC) said that in June 2024, he submitted tax settlement documents for 2021 and 2022 to the Hanoi Tax Department (now the Tax Department of Region 1), but was told that he had submitted them to the wrong tax authority. To submit the documents to another tax authority, he had to go to the tax authority where he submitted the documents to cancel the old documents.

Because he resides in Ho Chi Minh City, it would be too far to go to Hanoi to do these procedures, so Mr. PVV asked the tax officer for support. And it was not until early January 2025 that the tax records at the Hanoi Tax Department were successfully canceled.

In mid-January, Mr. PVV again submitted a request for a personal income tax refund for 2021 and 2022 to the District 10 Tax Department (HCMC Tax Department, now Region 2 Tax Department).

"But then, my application was not accepted because of the lack of dependents' identification documents and labor contracts," Mr. PVV said, lamenting that the tax refund amount was not too much, but it took 8 months to process the personal income tax refund application. Even though it is 2025, the 2021 and 2022 tax refunds have not been processed yet.

Sharing his case, Mr. NNPh. (HCMC) said that on April 25, 2024, he registered for personal income tax settlement for 2023 online on the website https://thuedientu.gdt.gov.vn.

Checking on the eTax Mobile application, the file was approved. But as of February 16, 2025, Mr. NNPh. still has not received the tax refund.

According to the response of the Tax Department of Region 2, his tax refund application was not accepted because the data on his final settlement declaration did not match the data on the deduction voucher of the paying agency.

Commenting on the story of individual taxpayers being nervous every time they submit their personal income tax finalization dossiers, Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Tu, a tax expert, said that this situation needs to be resolved soon to facilitate and ensure fairness for taxpayers and reduce the workload for tax authorities. Because when taxpayers underpay, they will be charged late payment fees, administrative fines, etc.

"Meanwhile, if there is an overpayment, the taxpayer must go to the settlement and have full documents, proof and correct data to get a refund of the overpayment from the previous year, which is very complicated.

Especially the fact that the tax amount that was overpaid 2-3 years ago has not been refunded is not okay, while the tax authority has enough data of the taxpayer" - Mr. Tu commented.

96% of the applications for refund of overpaid personal income tax

In the recent proposal to amend the Law on Tax Administration, the Ministry of Finance said that personal income tax will be automatically refunded.

According to the Ministry of Finance, the number of applications for refund of overpaid tax received and processed by tax authorities every year is very large, mainly concentrated at the time of finalizing personal income tax from wages and salaries.

According to statistics in 2023, the whole country had 360,633 applications for refund of overpaid tax, accounting for 95% of the total number of refund applications. Of which, 96% of the applications for refund of overpaid tax were for refund of personal income tax from wages and salaries.

Meanwhile, according to regulations, the time to process tax refunds is no more than 6 working days, which has put great pressure on the tax industry.

Therefore, the Tax Department proposes to automatically refund the excess tax payment without intervention from tax officials for taxpayers with no risk and eligible for refund first, check later.

Accordingly, from April 3, the Tax Department has officially implemented automatic personal income tax refunds for people on eTax Mobile.

After only 7 days of implementation, the number of automatic tax refund requests identified by the tax authority for automatic refund was 42,881 with 229.3 billion VND. The tax authority created a tax refund order and sent it electronically to the Treasury to pay tax refunds to taxpayers.

Also according to the Tax Department, through reviewing data at tax agencies, up to now, there are 94,165 units that have deducted personal income tax but have not yet paid the deducted personal income tax to the budget.

Therefore, the tax authority recommends that income-paying units promptly pay the deducted personal income tax of individuals to the state budget to ensure the right to automatic tax refund of individuals making tax refund settlements.

Need to refund personal income tax as soon as possible, as easy as transferring money

Supporting the legalization of the policy on automatic personal income tax refund, Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Tu suggested that tax refunds and tax payments should be made as convenient as transferring money to purchase goods and paying bills that the banking industry and service providers have long implemented.

To do this, data, income information, number of deductibles, deductions… must be accurate.

Accordingly, when determining that Mr. Nguyen Van A has paid more tax than the amount of tax payable, the tax authority will refund the taxpayer immediately and cannot wait until 2025 for the excess tax paid in 2022 and 2023 to be received due to problems with procedures and supporting documents.

Along with implementing automatic personal income tax refunds, Ms. Nguyen Thi Cuc, chairwoman of the Tax Consulting Association, said that the fundamental solution is to amend policy inadequacies.

In the direction that all income will be temporarily deducted from tax before payment regardless of the amount.

According to regulations, only when paying 2 million VND or more, the paying unit will deduct 10% tax. However, when finalizing, taxpayers must declare all income.

"In reality, there are many cases where taxpayers do not remember to declare and settle irregular income of several hundred thousand dong during the year.

Therefore, taxpayers have been charged back taxes and late payment fees..." - Ms. Cuc said and believed that temporarily deducting income at source will significantly reduce the number of tax refund applications, reducing the workload when processing tax refund applications for tax authorities.