Company left dormant since pandemic hit faces more than 34 million dong in fines to close

A Ho Chi Minh City business that never issued an invoice or generated revenue has cost its owner 34,559,800 Vietnamese dong to complete dissolution procedures after years of inactivity.

The company was registered in August 2020 to work in solar energy, just as the COVID-19 wave hit. Unable to launch the project, its owner abandoned the business, hired no accountant and stopped filing reports. In December 2024, the then Ba Ria-Vung Tau Department of Planning and Investment, now under Ho Chi Minh City’s Department of Finance, revoked the company’s business registration.

When the owner began the dissolution process in 2026, authorities reported unpaid obligations totaling nearly 35 million dong. The amount included a 23 million dong administrative fine for late tax declarations, eight million dong in business-license fees accumulated over four years, and more than 3.5 million dong in late-payment charges.

Nguyen Huy Huynh, a representative of a tax consultancy in Ho Chi Minh City, described a procedural dead end for dormant companies. Once an inactive business’s tax code is locked, tax officials require all overdue declarations before dissolution. Filing through the tax authority’s public-service portal requires a digital signature, but providers require a valid business license to issue one.

“When we went to the public-service portal to request a replacement business license, the system automatically blocked us because the tax code was locked,” Huynh said. He added that the problem forced them to ask tax officials to accept paper filings, a process that took about a month and required manual handling. The owner also had to buy a digital signature for at least six months, costing about 1.3 million dong, and make a new company seal solely to stamp the dissolution documents. Tax service providers charge between five million and 30 million dong to restore a dormant tax code, file overdue declarations and then dissolve a long-inactive company.

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When we went to the public-service portal to request a replacement business license, the system automatically blocked us because the tax code was locked.