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.
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.