Vietnamese casino fined for tax evasion

The Quang Ninh Tax Department has found the casino violating corporate tax and value-added tax regulations after inspecting returns filed in 2017 and its value-added-tax receipts until February 2018.

The department has levied total fines of $15,000, including $10,500 for faulty reporting of value added tax and $3,700 for using illegal invoices.

The Casino Gaming Club is the only gambling facility approved to serve foreigners exclusively in Ha Long Bay City, but it has been in the red since 2013.

Last October, the company’s financial report stated that its losses in the third quarter had jumped 23 times from a year ago to more than $3.04 million.

Managers said most of its customers were from Taiwan and mainland China, but their numbers have dwindled in recent times.

Revenue during the first quarter of 2018 totaled $2.92 million, the company’s financial report states. The property also generated $69,000 in profits after tax, which is a considerable increase from a loss of $908,000 during the same three months of 2017. However, it is believed that Royal International Corporation has accumulated loss of more than $7.4 million from its gambling operation on a total capital investment of around $30.5 million.

Casino officials have revealed that visitors from Taiwan represent their largest customer group and that the number of patrons from Mainland China has decreased significantly over the past several years. Chinese gamblers are the most popular customer group with stakeholders of the Asia-Pacific region’s casino industry due to their spending habits.

Patrons from China are targeted heavily by casinos in the area and competition has become even fiercer in the years after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-graft campaign that resulted in high rollers steering away from Asia’s gambling mecca Macau and looking for other destinations to gamble without appearing on Chinese authorities’ radar screens.