Improving the Quality of Final Account Settlement for Completed State-Budget Construction Projects in Vietnam Evidence on Timeliness, Completeness and Accuracy, 2016–2026

Abstract

Purpose. Final account settlement closes the financial life cycle of a public investment project. It fixes the value of the asset created, permits the project account to be cleared, allows advances to be recovered, and brings the asset onto the government’s books. In Vietnam it is also the least examined link in the public investment management chain. We ask why settlement performance has not improved over a decade in which the governing rules were rewritten repeatedly and eventually raised from ministerial circular to government decree.
Design and method. Our evidence base has three parts: the aggregate settlement disclosures the Ministry of Finance publishes each year, the unit-level disclosure issued by the Hà Nội People’s Committee for 2024, and the body of legal instruments on settlement issued between 2016 and 2026. Settlement quality is decomposed into three observable dimensions, each with an explicit operational definition. We combine descriptive statistics, stock-flow decomposition, conditional violation rates, concentration measures borrowed from industrial organisation, and content analysis of the regulatory record, the aim throughout being to separate what the rules explain from what implementation explains.
Findings. The share of completed projects breaching statutory deadlines has held near 18 to 20 per cent for several consecutive years, with no visible response to the elevation of the framework to decree level. Dossier preparation by investors and final approval by competent authorities account between them for 85.4 per cent of breaches; appraisal accounts for 14.6 per cent. Two thirds of the unapproved stock consists of projects whose dossiers have never been lodged, which places the bottleneck at initiation rather than at processing. Deductions at appraisal are low and stable nationally, at 0.614 per cent of the value claimed, but vary sharply by administrative level: in Hà Nội in 2024 the district-level rate ran at 3.2 times the city-level rate, and both move inversely with average project size. Most striking is how concentrated the delay burden turns out to be. Across Hà Nội’s thirty district-level units the Gini coefficient of overdue dossiers reaches 0.837 and the Herfindahl index 2,216, with two units carrying 62.6 per cent of the burden while twenty carry none at all. Capital still owed to completed projects stood at VND 31,288.8 billion, roughly 4.6 per cent of the 2024 development investment plan and up from 3.54 per cent two years earlier.
Originality and implications. We contribute an operational three-dimensional measurement framework for a stage of the investment cycle that existing diagnostics treat only in outline, introduce the appraisal deduction rate as a usable proxy for dossier quality, and show through concentration statistics that settlement failure is a unit-level rather than a systemic phenomenon. The policy corollary is that further regulatory reform promises little, and that effort is better spent on targeted capacity support, on digitalising the dossier trail, and on accountability aimed at the small group of units where the backlog actually sits.