LeadershipJul 2024
The lesson that redefined “leadership” for me
On serving as House Manager for the Digital Global Citizen Camp 2024, and the balance between empathy for the individual and responsibility to the collective goal.
Working notes on the rules I study and the rooms where they get explained. Written to be useful to someone doing the actual filing — not to summarise a press release.
Decree 253/2026/ND-CP and Circular 87/2026/TT-BTC, and the payroll habit that quietly gets personal income tax wrong.
The change I keep returning to is not a number. It is the rule on when taxable employment income arises: at the moment the enterprise actually pays the salary, not in the period the payslip happens to cover. Tax attaches to the month of payment, not the month the payroll reflects.
This is where payroll teams working from habit go wrong. The familiar sequence is to calculate salary, tax it against the month printed on the payroll sheet, and carry that straight into the finalisation return. But a single month's payroll routinely contains payments belonging elsewhere — a late-paid prior month, arrears, a retroactive adjustment. Assigning all of it to the payroll date misstates the period in which the obligation arose.
The shift required is from taxing the payroll to taxing the payment. For each disbursement, accounting has to separate what belongs to the current pay period from what is arrears or a correction of an earlier one, then assign each component to the month its obligation actually arose. This is a compliance matter, not a bookkeeping preference: tax inspections look closely at the real date of payment rather than the date on an internal payroll sheet.
What changed, in brief
Read together, these are not routine indexation. They point to a policy stance that is looser, closer to how people actually live, and more humane in what it treats as taxable — from shift meals and overtime through severance to medical and education costs. Enterprises and employees apply all of it from 1 July 2026.
Compiled from a webinar hosted by LuatVietnam with ATC Accounting & Tax. Published in two parts on LinkedIn, July 2026.
What it means for audit when more than three in every ten dong lent has already passed an environmental screen.
At a seminar on credit solutions for the green and circular economy, co-hosted by the State Bank of Vietnam, GIZ and the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment, the framing that stayed with me was structural rather than aspirational.
Vietnam's credit-to-GDP ratio sits at 144–146%, with total outstanding credit around 19 quadrillion dong. At that scale, a green framework is not a gesture; it is the instrument that decides where an enormous pool of capital goes. The draft intersectoral framework for green and circular projects rests on four principles: legal compliance, alignment with international standards, continuous updating, and reduced bureaucracy — supported in practice by a 2% annual state interest subsidy for private businesses and households, conditioned on independent evaluation against ESG criteria.
Two figures make the concept concrete. Outstanding green credit has grown 4.6 times since 2017, reaching VND 827,821 billion across 82 financial institutions — no longer a trial by a handful of banks, but mainstream across the system. And credit assessed for environmental and social risk has reached VND 5,748,847 billion, over 30% of total outstanding credit.
Put plainly: of every ten dong entering the market, more than three must pass an environmental screen. That moves green risk out of the vague social register and into material financial risk that banks are obliged to manage.
In class we are taught to read financial risk through conventional numbers. Seeing the structural scale makes a different point — environmental governance is becoming a core risk-management mechanism. For anyone heading into internal controls or audit, the role will extend beyond the standard financial voucher: we will need to understand how these green criteria are verified before we can attest to financial transparency at all.
Seminar: “Credit Solutions to Promote Green Economy, Circular Economy, and ESG”, Hanoi, July 2026.
Why detective controls no longer protect anyone, and what that asks of the next generation of auditors.
At the Digital Trust in Finance 2026 forum in Hanoi, leaders from the Ministry of Public Security, the State Bank of Vietnam and the major commercial banks converged on one idea: digital trust is not a technical preference. It is the soft infrastructure on which the digital economy rests.
One figure reframed the problem for me. Fraudulent transfers now take 40 to 45 seconds to evaporate through multiple banking layers. That comprehensively outruns any traditional mechanism for freezing an account.
For an auditing student, this is a direct challenge to how the discipline is taught. Audit leans heavily on detective controls — looking backward along the historical trail to catch error or fraud after the fact. When money disappears in under a minute, looking backward protects no one. The defence has to move toward automated preventive controls built into the technology from day one.
Protecting that soft infrastructure cannot rest on telling users to be careful in the face of sophisticated AI-driven fraud. It takes regulators and banks building systemic emergency brakes that stop illicit money at the starting line, not at the audit.
Digital Trust in Finance 2026, Hanoi, June 2026.
On serving as House Manager for the Digital Global Citizen Camp 2024, and the balance between empathy for the individual and responsibility to the collective goal.
A reflection on volunteering in Lam Dong province — bringing laughter to children, and learning what intention is worth when resources are thin.
Most of these notes began as something I could not find a clear answer to.