Recently visited. It's a wonderful country. I loved the people, I love their pride and attitude. It's clear that you got some problems here and there (and maybe the family concept is a bit too strong). All in all, for me it's been just a wow after another. I met very few Americans, and each one of them was completely flabbergasted by how far the country and the people are from what they've been taught.
Coconut_crab, holy shit... I recognized your nickname from the VnOSS forum 10 years ago, so before I saw your answer, I already knew it. It's amazing you're still around. Hope you're still doing well.
Lovely country (excepting the smog in HCM) and lovely people. Until recently I had a company whose customers were primarily digital marketers in Vietnam. My anecdotal observation is that tax compliance is generally poor and enforcement is applied unevenly.
While whinging about taxes is a national pastime here in the US, we have one of the highest tax compliance rates in the world. These might be related. And it's not true that you can make taxes go away with accounting magic, although there seems to be a growing sentiment that "the other guy is doing it". Example: Bourdain's comment about avoiding taxes by living abroad is nonsense.
Those "transparency indexes" tend to reflect the biases (cultural and political) and the interests of the major contributors to the organizations that produce them (including organizations like OECD).
And unlike measurable data, where you can double check, here you have to agree not just on the methodology, but on the validity of various sources, self-reporting (which is often used as a proxy), etc.