Ho Chi Minh City Names 4,125 Tax Debtors Owing $452 Million, Led by Property Developers

Ho Chi Minh City's tax authority has published the names of 4,125 businesses owing a combined VND11.93 trillion, about $452 million, with Vung Tau Paradise Joint Venture Co. at the top of the list at VND2.215 trillion, roughly $84 million. The figures are current as of August 2026, and property companies account for the largest single debts on it.

What it means for a foreign buyer

If you are buying off-plan in Ho Chi Minh City, this list is now a free credit check on your counterparty, and you should run the selling entity's name against it before you pay a deposit. A developer carrying hundreds of billions of dong in overdue tax has cash committed elsewhere, and the companies named are not marginal: Housing Development and Trading Joint Stock Company, or HDTC, appears at VND520 billion, Forest City Co., Ltd. at VND209 billion, Ngan Hiep Real Estate Joint Stock Company at VND151 billion, Saigon One Tower Joint Stock Company at VND132 billion and BCG Land Joint Stock Company at VND78.7 billion. The smaller names on the list run from VND18.4 billion to VND78.5 billion. Check the legal name on your sale and purchase agreement rather than the brand on the marketing, because the entity that signs is often a project company rather than the group, and a developer that runs out of money mid-project is how buyers end up waiting years for a pink book.

There is a second, more practical consequence. Under the exit ban thresholds now in force, a legal representative of an enterprise owing VND500 million or more for longer than 120 days can be barred from leaving Vietnam. Every property company named above exceeds that threshold by a wide margin, the smallest of them by a factor of more than 150. If your contract requires a specific legal representative to appear in person to sign, notarise or hand over, you are relying on a person who may be subject to travel restrictions and whose company is under active enforcement pressure.

Run the name, then decide whether the discount is worth it.

What changed

The disclosure is periodic, and the movement between editions is as informative as the list. The previous list, published in late December 2025 on data as of November 2025, named 4,233 businesses owing nearly VND14,370 billion. Vung Tau Paradise stood at VND2,066 billion then, so its debt has grown by roughly VND149 billion over the period. HDTC moved the other way, from VND850 billion in the November 2025 data to VND520 billion in the August 2026 data.

The headline totals have fallen, from VND14,370 billion across 4,233 names to VND11.93 trillion across 4,125. That is a reduction in the published stock of debt rather than evidence that the largest cases are resolving, and the largest case on the list has in fact got larger. Saigon One Tower, at VND132 billion, is a reminder of how long a stalled Ho Chi Minh City project can sit unfinished, and of why the delivery record of the city's developers is worth reading before committing to a tower still in the ground.

The mechanism

Publication is not a discretionary press exercise. It is required under point a, clause 1 of Article 100 of the 2019 Law on Tax Administration, which allows the tax authority to disclose taxpayer information where a taxpayer has failed to comply within 90 days of a payment deadline. Appearing on the list is therefore itself a legal finding that the 90-day mark has passed.

The enforcement that follows sits in a separate instrument. Decree No. 252/2026/ND-CP sets the criteria for temporarily suspending exit from Vietnam for tax debtors. It applies a VND50 million threshold, overdue by more than 120 days, to individuals engaged in business and heads of household businesses, and a VND500 million threshold on the same 120-day basis to legal representatives of enterprises, cooperatives and cooperative unions. Businesses operating from abandoned addresses face no minimum threshold at all and get 30 days to settle after an enforcement notice. The tax authority must give at least 30 days of notice before requesting a ban. The decree rests on the Law on Tax Administration No. 38/2019/QH14 as amended by Law No. 56/2024/QH15, and replaces the thresholds first set by Decree No. 49/2025/ND-CP in February 2025.

Context

Ho Chi Minh City has been escalating on this front for some time. By the start of March 2026 the city's tax sector had imposed temporary exit bans on 32,820 individuals covering more than VND8,495 billion in arrears, and had publicly disclosed nearly 160,000 tax debtor cases through the media. Total outstanding tax debt in the city stood at about VND92,011 billion, some $3.5 billion, as of 31 December 2025, up VND26,340 billion on the year before, against VND593 billion recovered over the preceding twelve months. The stated target for 2026 is to bring the debt down below 8 percent of actual collections. This enforcement push runs alongside a separate legislative overhaul, with rewritten housing and real estate business bills heading to the National Assembly this month.

The useful point is that Vietnam now produces a public, named, dated record of which developers are behind on their obligations to the state, and it is a better guide to delivery risk than a brochure. It is the same check Bektu (https://bektu.com) applies to developer delivery history, and here the tax department is doing part of the work for you.