Nike said Ho Chi Minh City is the only place that requires foreign workers to submit applications for work permits to Vietnam in batches, and the recruitment process in the city has caused difficulties for businesses.
Ahead of the 2024 policy dialogue program organized by the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee and the Vietnam Business Forum (VBF) Alliance on September 18, the FDI business community sent their opinions reflecting the difficulties they encountered while operating in Ho Chi Minh City as well as some southern provinces and cities.
Specifically, Nike said that currently, Ho Chi Minh City requires companies to only apply for work permits after previous applications are completed. This has caused significant delays in bringing foreign workers into Vietnam.
Researching procedures in other localities, Nike said that Ho Chi Minh City is the only place that requires work permit applications to be submitted in batches. In fact, the frequency or timing of a business's need to submit work permit applications depends on the business's needs.
“We need to be more responsive to enable us to process work permit approvals when needed. The current batch approval policy creates backlogs and additional operational challenges,” Nike said.
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| Nike said Ho Chi Minh City is the only place that requires work permit applications to be submitted in batches, a policy that creates backlogs and additional challenges for business operations. |
The recruitment process in Ho Chi Minh City also causes difficulties for businesses. Nike said that the company is required to interview three candidates selected by the competent authority and report the interview results to the Department of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs.
This requirement poses a number of challenges. First, it creates a huge backlog and workload for public officials. It is a challenge to find the right staff to evaluate thousands of different job requests across many areas, many of which are certainly beyond the knowledge and understanding of any one employee.
On the business side, this requirement is delaying the hiring process and the recruiting firm is no longer able to hire the people it judges to be the best fit for the job.
Nike believes that posting job vacancies through the Government's statutory portal to encourage the recruitment of local talent is the right thing to do.
However, in other provinces, authorities are implementing Decree 70/2023/ND-CP without adding a requirement for businesses to interview 3 candidates selected by competent authorities and report the interview results to competent authorities.
The VBF Human Resources Working Group also acknowledged that Decree 84/2024/ND-CP on piloting decentralization of state management in some areas to the Ho Chi Minh City government has delegated the authority to process job position approvals and work permit applications from the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs to the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee, and these applications are normally processed by the City's Department of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs.
Up to now, the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs has stopped receiving these applications, but both the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee and the City's Department of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs have not yet begun receiving and processing these applications.
The Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee and the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs should coordinate to resolve this issue as soon as possible because there are many urgent documents from businesses that need to be submitted.
In Binh Duong, the VBF Human Resources Working Group also pointed out that the local Department of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs does not recognize the form/job category of Director, Executive Director, Expert and Technician (MEDET) as prescribed in Decree 152/2020/ND-CP.
While in other provinces, this form is used by businesses in the case of assigning an employee to work for a branch of the same company, which is not the parent company of the Vietnamese legal entity and therefore is not considered an internal transfer under Vietnamese law.
Itochu Vietnam Co., Ltd. said that the company fully met the conditions for value-added tax refund according to regulations, but the Tax Department was slow to process the Company's value-added tax refund dossier for a long time (2 years) because the Tax Department determined that the Company purchased goods from suppliers with invoice risks and requested verification.
Accordingly, the Company has explained many times about the transaction of buying and selling goods, but up to now the Tax Department has not yet concluded and had a final solution for the Company, affecting the Company's cash flow up to tens of billions of VND in tax refunds.
Itochu is a 100% Japanese-invested enterprise, whose main activities are importing plastic pellets for export and purchasing scrap steel domestically and reselling to domestic customers.
The company submitted an application for input tax refund for plastic pellet export activities for the period from October 2020 to April 2022 to the Tax Department in June 2022 and has been inspected by the Tax Department before tax refund from June 2022 to present.
However, the Tax Department's verification process has lasted from 2022 to present, but the Tax Department has not yet concluded or resolved the Company's tax refund dossier, while the Company has actively cooperated to provide complete purchase and sale documents with these suppliers, including documents for transporting goods from the stage of level 2 suppliers to the Company's customers to prove the authenticity of the goods transport flow.
Itochu Vietnam said that the backlog of tax payments amounted to nearly VND80 billion, and the delay in processing tax refund dossiers has greatly affected the Company's cash flow while its business operations are facing many difficulties. At the same time, it also affects investors' confidence in the implementation of the Government's tax refund policy, negatively impacting the investment environment.
Source: https://baodautu.vn/nike-gap-kho-voi-giay-phep-lao-dong-nuoc-ngoai-tai-tphcm-d225026.html
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