A recent lowball tax declaration of US$62,340 (VND1.4 billion) by Nguyen Ha Dong, creator of Flappy Bird, a Vietnamese mobile game that created quite a whirlwind last year, has created quite a tax flap, according to officials.

Dong was reportedly grossing US$50,000 a day from the app before pulling the game in February last year, more than a month after it became the most downloaded game on both the Apple Store and Google Play.

Most sceptics believe that the income tax should be much higher including Vietnamese tax authorities who are having some difficulty buying the ostensibly low figures reported by Dong.

Nguyen Van Phung, a senior official at the General Department of Taxation, recently said at a press conference that local authorities are still groping on how best to manage the taxation of online business activities in general.

The app was purportedly downloaded 50 million times and generated an average of US$50,000 a day from in-app ads, said Mr Phung. According to calculations from different sources, the sum from in-app ads might amount to roughly US$3 million.

However, the taxable earning of Dong Nguyen at this point is still unknown, and as a rule in the past, the Department largely relied on declarations by taxpayers to accurately report their overseas earnings, said Mr Phung.

Even though the government has issued several complicated regulations related to such activities, it is still difficult to manage them thoroughly, said Phung, however, he remained confident that Vietnamese authorities will deal with the uproar or ‘flap’ this situation has created.

VOV