Compliance calendar after licensing: the filings, reports, payments and renewals a Vietnamese company must keep up, month by month

How Vietnamese compliance is organised

There is no Companies House-style annual return. A Vietnamese company reports to several authorities on their own cycles: the tax authority (monthly, quarterly and annually), the business registration office (on each change), the investment registration authority (quarterly and annually, for companies with a project), Vietnam Social Security and the labour authority (monthly, half-yearly and annually), the State Bank (for foreign loans and the capital account), the Statistics Office (periodic statistical returns) and the sector regulators. Almost every filing is electronic and requires the company's digital signature, so the first compliance task is to keep the digital certificate and the portal accounts current and in the hands of someone who is in Vietnam. The second is a single calendar, owned by one person, that merges all the cycles; the table below is that calendar for a company with a calendar financial year.

The audit and the annual financial statements

Every foreign-invested company must have its annual financial statements audited by an independent audit firm licensed in Vietnam, under Law No. 67/2011/QH12 on Independent Audit and its decrees, prepared under Vietnamese Accounting Standards and the enterprise accounting regime (Circular No. 200/2014/TT-BTC as amended), with IFRS permitted or required for some larger entities under the Ministry of Finance's roadmap, and file them within 90 days of the financial year end with the tax authority, the Statistics Office, the business registration office and, for companies with a project, the licensing authority. The audited accounts are the gateway to profit remittance: no audit, no dividend abroad. A company may adopt a financial year ending on the last day of a quarter other than December, registered with the tax authority, which moves the annual deadlines accordingly. Accounting records and vouchers are kept for ten years, in Vietnamese (bilingual is acceptable in practice for internal documents), and the chief accountant, or an outsourced accounting firm, must hold the prescribed qualification.

Tax returns and payments in outline

Monthly VAT and PIT withholding returns are due by the 20th of the following month, or quarterly by the last day of the month after the quarter where prior-year revenue is up to VND 50 billion. Provisional CIT is paid quarterly by the 30th of the month after each quarter, without a return, and the four instalments must together reach at least 80% of the final liability or late-payment interest runs on the shortfall from the Q4 due date. The annual CIT finalisation, with the audited financial statements where required and the related-party disclosures, and the employer's PIT finalisation, are due by the last day of the third month after year end; individuals finalising their own PIT have until the end of the fourth month. Foreign contractor tax is declared within ten days of each payment, or monthly where the payer registers to do so. The annual business licence fee was abolished from 2026. Law No. 108/2025/QH15 on Tax Administration, effective 1 July 2026, kept these deadlines and the 0.03% daily late-payment interest; the full tax picture is in Chapter 3.

Changes, licences and the ten-day rule

Any change to the information on the ERC, and to beneficial owners, must be registered or notified within ten days of the decision, through the National Business Registration Portal with electronic authentication. Changes to the project (capital, objectives, location, schedule, investor) require an IRC adjustment, which should be sequenced before the ERC change where both are needed, and a change of foreign ownership across a threshold requires Article 21 registration before either. Sector licences, the trading business licence, work permits, residence cards, the environmental permit and fire-safety certificates each have their own renewal lead times, and the most common compliance failure in a foreign-invested company is an expired licence that nobody diarised when the person who obtained it left. A licence register with expiry dates and lead times, reviewed quarterly, is the simplest control.

Labour, insurance and the State Bank

Labour reporting runs on its own cycle: an initial declaration of labour use within 30 days of starting operations, half-yearly reports on changes in labour use by 5 June and 5 December, registration of internal labour rules once the company has ten or more employees, work permit and exemption records, and annual occupational safety and accident reports. Vietnam Social Security requires registration on the first labour contract, monthly contributions by the last day of the month and notification of joiners, leavers and salary changes. Registered foreign loans are reported to the State Bank online on a quarterly basis and on each drawdown and repayment outside the registered schedule, and the investment capital account's bank reports the flows through it. The employment detail is in Chapter 4 and the banking detail in Chapter 6.

Penalties and consequences

Late tax filing is fined by reference to the delay under Decree No. 125/2020/ND-CP as amended by Decree No. 310/2025/ND-CP, up to VND 25 million per return, and late payment attracts interest of 0.03% a day; an understatement attracts a 20% penalty on the shortfall. Late business registration notifications attract modest fines but leave a record. Missing investment reports attract fines under the planning and investment penalty decree, and persistent failure weighs against the company in later applications. Late social insurance contributions attract interest at a penal rate under the Law on Social Insurance and, above thresholds, criminal liability for evasion. Operating on an expired licence can mean suspension of the activity and, for a foreign-invested trader, an inability to clear imports. A compliance calendar is cheap insurance against all of these.