Some people here do pay bribes. I do not. Neither do most people around my age that I know.
I immigrated here 12 years ago. I have a company license, a driving license, proper residency, and so on.
I got every last piece of it by filling out forms, and waiting a normal amount of time. I speak Vietnamese like a small child and have no Vietnamese heritage.
Perhaps some people will report something different, and perhaps they are also correct. However, this is my story.
We're Westerners so we're insulated from low level corruption because we can report to the Tourist Police and our local Consulate or Embassy, who will complain to that Quan's MPS.
The kind of low level corruption your mentioning impacts the working class or middle class (the kind living in a 1 bedroom apartment in D10 with a Honda motorbike) because they have no recourse.
That said, the mid-upper level corruption is very significant. How else do you see retired generals and senior party apparatchiks with a $50/mo pension eating steaks at the Landmark 81 and living in a villa in Thao Dien.
And this is why my SO makes it a principle to always speak in English so she doesn't get Vietnamese service.
> And this is why my SO makes it a principle to always speak in English so she doesn't get Vietnamese service.
That's a general recommendation for any overseas Vietnamese (Viet Kieu) to just pretend not to speak Vietnamese any time they interact with officials. They'll never get aggressive and will usually move onto easier prey.
But you are correct the low level corruption is common. A good story I heard was getting the household registration completed at the police station - bring in forms, call back "you forgot to sign this form", go back and sign the form, a couple weeks later you call "oh, it was actually the wrong form, come back", go back sign another form, a couple weeks later "it's not finished yet", a couple weeks later "you're missing one form".
Finally, they go in, finish that form and say "hey, you've been working hard, let me buy you a coffee" and you slip them the equivalent of $10 USD (about 20x the cost of a coffee). Poof, magic, it's done the next day and the cop will even swing by your home to drop off the paperwork.
A lot of the corruption is simply slow-rolling things until what the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act calls "facilitation payments" are made.
Back when my family built our house a few years ago, we had to pay some bribe for a local officer to get our construction permission, otherwise it will get delayed for who knows how long.
On paper, gov's officer's salary is <500usd a month, yet several provincial secretary own large houses and villas. Where does the money come from ?
You see this stuff reported once in a while in Vietnamese newspaper, and stuff that are not reported could be worse.
Amomg Vietnamese people, government's corruption is well known, happens at every level, and everybody I know is treating it as an open secret.
My very limited experience with Vietnam officials was that you could avoid bribes, but it was much more convenient to just bribe them.
I was going through the land border from Laos to Vietnam and was told to leave some "coffee money" in my passport on both sides of the border. I think it was either 20k or 50k Dong.
Apparently if you did not do this, you would get seen last and they would stamp it perfectly diagonally in the middle of a fresh passport page to try and ruin that page.
No idea if this was actually true because everyone just paid.
On the other hand it's 21 billion.
Still rough.