Working with Vietnamese Authorities
Anyone who has applied for a license, filed paperwork, or waited for a single signature from a Vietnamese government office has likely heard some version of the same reply: more time is needed to process the matter because there is no regulation covering it. Foreign investors, businesses, and even Vietnamese citizens themselves routinely complain that dealing with the state apparatus feels like navigating through fog. A dossier is submitted and simply sits there; a procedure that looks straightforward drags on for months; and no one can say with confidence when, or even whether, it will be resolved.
But is it really that hard? Or is much of the difficulty rooted in the fact that both sides: the person seeking a service, and the official processing it, have not fully grasped a core institutional logic that quietly governs the entire apparatus? The logic runs so deep that citizens and organizations, having lived with it their whole lives, may simply regard it as just another Tuesday.
Two Sides of One Principle
That principle can be stated simply: citizens may do anything the law does not forbid; officials may only do what the law expressly permits.
This is not an empty slogan, the citizen-facing half has a fairly clear origin in the drafting of the 2005 Civil Code. When introducing the code, the leadership of the Ministry of Justice at the time described it as a significant shift: parties to civil relations were now free to enter into commitments and agreements so long as they did not violate a statutory prohibition, a departure from the earlier logic under which an act was valid only if it conformed to an explicit provision. That same spirit was reinforced by Articles 3(2) of the 2015 Civil Code.
Article 3. Basic principles of civil law 2. Each person establishes, exercises/fulfills and terminates his/her civil rights and obligations on the basis of freely and voluntarily entering into commitments and/or agreements. Each commitment or agreement that does not violate regulations of law and is not contrary to social ethics shall be bound by contracting parties and must be respected by other entities.
Meanwhile, Resolution 27-NQ/TW (2022) on building a socialist rule-of-law state directs the state to "properly implement the principle that citizens may do everything the law does not forbid" as part of ensuring the people's right to mastery and protecting human and citizens' rights.
IV. TASKS AND SOLUTIONS 2. ... Properly implement the principle that citizens may do everything the law does not forbid; citizens' rights are inseparable from citizens' obligations, and the exercise of human rights and citizens' rights must not infringe upon national interests or the lawful rights and interests of organizations and individuals.
The other half of the principle, the constraint placed on officials, does have a textual anchor, even though the exact phrase never appears. Article 2(3) and Article 8(1) of the 2013 Constitution provides that
Article 2 3. State power is unified, with a clear assignment, coordination, and control among state agencies in exercising legislative, executive, and judicial power. ... Article 8 1. The State shall be organized and operate in accordance with the Constitution and law, manage society by the Constitution and law, and implement the principle of democratic centralism.
Read together, these two provisions establish the constitutional basis for the rule that a state agency or official may act only within the powers and duties the law has assigned to it, the root of the maxim "officials may only do what the law permits," even though that sentence itself is nowhere written verbatim into the constitutional text. This constitutional logic was later carried into statutory form governing individual officials: Article 34(1)(c) of the Law on Cadres and Civil Servants (2025) conditions the exemption or mitigation of an official's liability on the requirement that an innovation or initiative be undertaken only where it "has been permitted by a competent agency or organization" and confirmed by the appropriate authority as consistent with policy and pursued for the common good, a structure that only makes sense if the default rule is that an official may not act without such permission in the first place.
Article 34. Exclusion, Exemption, or Mitigation of Liability for Cadres and Civil Servants 1. Cadres and civil servants shall be considered for exclusion, exemption, or mitigation of liability in the following cases: c) Implementing a proposal for innovation or creative reform that has been permitted by a competent agency or organization, and which the competent authority has determined was carried out in accordance with policy, with sincere motives, and for the common good;
The result is a deliberately asymmetric structure: citizens are presumed free unless the law says otherwise; officials are presumed constrained unless the law says otherwise. As a matter of institutional design, this asymmetry is a defensible way to shield citizens' rights from arbitrary power. But the real value of any institution lies not in its declaration but in how it plays out in practice, and that is where things get complicated.
Difficult but Easy at the same time
This asymmetry produces one very practical consequence for anyone dealing with a Vietnamese government office: almost everything needs to be expressed in writing, issued by a competent authority.
Because officials may act only when they have a legal basis, or at minimum a written directive, an official reply, a formal opinion, a verbal promise or an informal exchange carries little weight when it comes to actually getting something signed or approved. Once a proper document exists, however, even something as modest as a formal request for guidance (in writing) answered by a formal reply (in writing), drafted according to the administrative format becomes the official's shield: proof that they acted within their authority.
Understood this way, working with Vietnamese authorities is not the mystery many assume it to be. Rather than relying on verbal exchanges or informal emails, the practical move is to put requests, commitments, and agreements into formal written form, request an official opinion, and follow through until a corresponding written reply is issued. Once that paper trail exists, the official handling the case has both the incentive and the cover to move faster, because their personal risk has been reduced. In other words, much of the perceived "difficulty" does not stem from gaps in the law itself, but from not yet operating the "documented evidence" mechanism that this very institution requires.
A Vicious Cycle
Stopping here, however, would paint too rosy a picture. Policy researchers, the press, and even National Assembly delegates have repeatedly acknowledged that this same asymmetry: "whatever is not forbidden is allowed" for citizens, versus "whatever is not permitted is forbidden" for officials has become fertile ground for what Vietnamese press bluntly calls "fear-of-responsibility syndrome."
The trouble lies in the gap between "the law permits it" and "the law simply says nothing." In a legal system still marked by overlap and inconsistency, the same situation can be interpreted differently by different agencies at different times. For an ordinary citizen, this ambiguity is usually resolved in their favor: not forbidden means allowed. For an official, the very same ambiguity becomes dangerous terrain: the absence of an explicit provision offers no protection if the act is later judged improper. The result is that a share of officials choose the safest route available: pushing the matter up the chain "for guidance," even when the issue falls squarely within their own authority. One National Assembly delegate captured the resulting dynamic in a widely cited line: inside the apparatus, officials fear making a mistake; outside it, the public sighs in frustration.
The consequence is a form of systemic paralysis: dossiers that could be resolved at a lower level get escalated upward; public investment projects stall for want of a single signature; businesses wait months for procedures that should take days. Notably, even the Party's own central bodies have acknowledged the problem, calling out "buck-passing, avoidance, perfunctory performance, and fear of decision-making" among cadres, particularly those in leadership and management roles. That such language comes from official channels, not outside critics, suggests the issue is neither marginal nor incidental.
In short, whenever a case falls outside what lawmakers anticipated the system has little built-in confidence to simply let it proceed, and everything grinds to a wait.
Recognizing and Changing
It would be inaccurate to leave the account there, since Vietnam has, over the past several years, undertaken concrete measures aimed at breaking precisely this cycle, even if those measures have, so far, moved carefully rather than sweepingly.
The first concerns the construction of a legal shield for those prepared to act. Beginning with Politburo Conclusion 14-KL/TW (2021), which set the political direction of encouraging and protecting dynamic, creative officials, the government translated this into Decree 73/2023/NĐ-CP. It is worth being precise about what this decree actually changed. It did not grant officials a general license to act first and justify themselves later; an official's proposal for innovation must still be submitted, reported to the corresponding Party committee, and formally approved by the employing agency before it is carried out. What changed is what happens after approval: if an approved initiative, pursued in good faith and for the common good, falls short of its goal, the official responsible may have liability excluded, exempted, or mitigated. In other words, the reform does not yet dissolve the underlying "ask-and-be-granted" structure, it makes asking worthwhile, by removing much of the personal downside that once made officials reluctant to propose anything untested in the first place. For a system built for decades around the presumption that officials may only do what is expressly permitted, loosening the consequences of permitted risk-taking, before loosening the requirement of permission itself, is arguably the more prudent sequencing: it tests whether officials will actually use the protection before the state removes the oversight step altogether.
The second concerns an administrative restructuring and decentralization of unprecedented scale. Since July 1, 2025, Vietnam has operated under a two-tier local government structure, having eliminated the district level entirely, a change described as a historic milestone in the country's administrative reform. Of the roughly 1,164 tasks reassigned across levels of government, the large majority were devolved directly to the commune level, while only a small share were elevated to regional bodies or discontinued. Consequently, a considerably greater share of decisions is now made at the level closest to the citizen, in place of the earlier practice of routing matters "for approval" through multiple intervening tiers. Unlike the liability-shield reform, this one does directly shrink the number of layers an approval must travel through, a structural change rather than only a change in incentives.
The third concerns the reduction of procedural burden and the digitization of records, both of which narrow the room for arbitrary interpretation. Once procedures are standardized and digitized, officials retain far less latitude to invoke ambiguity as grounds for delay. Several ministries have already published concrete figures on procedures eliminated and online public services expanded for the 2025 - 2026 period, evidence that this is a measurable trajectory rather than intention alone.
Conclusion
None of these reforms, taken individually, fully resolves the tension this essay set out to describe. Decree 73/2023 still asks officials to seek permission before they act; it has simply made permission-seeking less risky. The two-tier restructuring removes layers of approval but does not, by itself, remove the underlying legal requirement that officials act only within an expressly granted scope of authority. And digitization narrows ambiguity without eliminating the deeper asymmetry between what citizens and officials are each permitted to do by default.
That may be exactly as it should be, for a change of this scale. Reworking the basic relationship between a state apparatus of this size and the citizens it serves is not the kind of change that can, or perhaps should, happen in a single decree. Institutions built up over decades, reinforced through generations of officials trained to treat permission-seeking as the safest default, are not undone by a single legal instrument, nor would attempting to undo them overnight necessarily produce a more accountable, better-functioning state. What the past several years show is a state moving in a consistent direction: first building the protective mechanisms that make risk-taking survivable, then shrinking the physical and procedural distance between citizens and the officials empowered to decide, then removing the ambiguity that made caution the rational choice in the first place. Each step is modest on its own; together, they describe a trajectory, not a finished reform.
The genuine test still lies ahead: whether officials come to trust the protections enough to actually use them, whether decentralization is matched by adequate capacity at the grassroots level, and whether the legal gray zone continues to narrow as digitization and standardization proceed. But for an institution this deeply embedded, one that shapes how a government of nearly 100 million people relates to the state, deliberate, sequenced change is arguably a more credible sign of seriousness than a single sweeping reversal would be. The road, at least on paper and in the early figures, has been opened; how quickly it is walked will depend on whether these incremental changes continue to compound.
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References
The Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, No. 52/VBHN-VPQH (consolidated text, incorporating the amendments made by Resolution No. 203/2025/QH15).
National Assembly of Vietnam, Resolution No. 203/2025/QH15, dated June 16, 2025, on Amendments and Supplements to a Number of Articles of the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
National Assembly of Vietnam, Civil Code, No. 33/2005/QH11, dated June 14, 2005.
National Assembly of Vietnam, Civil Code, No. 91/2015/QH13, dated November 24, 2015.
National Assembly of Vietnam, Law on Cadres and Civil Servants, No. 80/2025/QH15, dated June 24, 2025.
Government of Vietnam, Decree No. 73/2023/NĐ-CP, dated September 29, 2023, on Encouraging and Protecting Cadres Who Are Dynamic, Creative, Dare to Think, Dare to Act, and Dare to Take Responsibility for the Common Good.
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Resolution No. 27-NQ/TW, dated November 9, 2022, on Continuing to Build and Perfect the Socialist Rule-of-Law State of Vietnam in the New Period.
Politburo of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Conclusion No. 14-KL/TW, dated September 22, 2021, on Encouraging and Protecting Dynamic and Creative Cadres for the Common Good.
*Disclaimer: This article reflects author's research and perspective for general informational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice for any specific case.
