Ho Chi Minh City’s Social Insurance agency has proposed a systematic review of the city’s 6,787 licensed transport businesses to check whether they are meeting mandatory insurance obligations for drivers, amid growing concern about evasion and unpaid contributions.
Nguyen Quoc Thanh, deputy director of the agency, made the proposal during a working session with a Federation of Labor monitoring delegation on Tuesday. He said the sector’s scale - 324,473 permitted vehicles across cooperatives, companies and individual operators - requires stricter management. The agency asked the city’s Federation of Labor to recommend that the City People’s Committee direct the Department of Construction to participate in the review alongside it.
The review would examine labor contracts and whether social insurance, health insurance and unemployment insurance contributions are being paid for drivers and vehicle service staff subject to mandatory participation. The agency specifically flagged the use of cooperation contracts, service contracts or other arrangements designed to obscure the employment relationship and avoid contribution obligations.
As of September 30, delayed contributions across the three schemes totalled nearly VN$13.6 trillion, representing more than 8.4% of Vietnam Social Insurance’s revenue target. Some 158,273 units had delayed payments. The agency described debt recovery as a key task and said it is classifying businesses by extent, cause and recoverability.
Vietnam’s Law on Social Insurance, effective July 1, 2025, now formally separates late payment from deliberate evasion of compulsory contributions, according to an analysis by law firm Rajah & Tann Asia. Decree 283/2026/ND-CP, issued July 15 and effective September 10, sets distinct fines for each category. Under-declaring the wage used as the contribution base, or continued non-payment after a reminder, attracts a fine of 18% to 20% of the evaded amount, capped at VN$75 million. Repeat violations can be referred to criminal authorities.
Statistics from Ho Chi Minh City Social Insurance, reported by Lao Dong, show 100 businesses have been late in paying for six months or more, collectively owing more than VN$892 billion for nearly 13,500 employees.
Not all operators are in breach. A representative of a transport company based in eastern Ho Chi Minh City said all its drivers sign contracts and join social and health insurance before starting work.
“For drivers working at the company, full compliance with regulations is mandatory,” the representative said. “Failure to do so, in the event of an incident during operation, makes it easy for authorities to discover that the company has not complied with regulations regarding its employees. In that case, the company will be penalized, seriously affecting its reputation and brand.”
The combination of a new legal framework separating evasion from late payment, active debt classification, and a proposed sector-wide review signals that compliance enforcement in Vietnam’s transport sector is becoming more systematic rather than episodic.
For brokers advising multinationals with Vietnam transport procurement, logistics operators, or employers with drivers on their books, the review is a prompt to check whether social insurance and health insurance obligations form part of their clients’ risk management conversations - and whether their employment contracts reflect the nature of the actual working relationship. As Vietnam Social Insurance begins classifying businesses by debt severity and recoverability, the distinction between a company that has been late and one that has been evading will carry increasingly significant legal and reputational consequences.
