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Three Old Digital-Signature Circulars Expire on 15 November: Việt Nam Finishes Moving E-Signing Onto Nghị định 23/2025

Some of the most important legal changes are deletions. On 1 October 2026 the Ministry of Science and Technology (Bộ Khoa học và Công nghệ) published Thông tư 59/2026/TT-BKHCN on its legal-documents portal. The circular has two articles and creates no new obligations. What it does is repeal three circulars from the former Ministry of Information and Communications (Bộ Thông tin và Truyền thông), the ministry merged into Science and Technology in 2025. Between them, those circulars governed two things for most of the last 17 years: how digital-signature providers got licensed, and how state agencies signed and checked electronic documents. From 15 November 2026, those rules come only from the newer instruments built on the 2023 Law on Electronic Transactions.

The document

  • Number: Thông tư 59/2026/TT-BKHCN
  • Issuing body: Bộ Khoa học và Công nghệ; signed by Minister Vũ Hải Quân
  • Signed: 25 September 2026 (published on the ministry portal on 1 October 2026)
  • Effective: 15 November 2026
  • Drafted by: the National Electronic Authentication Centre (Trung tâm Chứng thực điện tử quốc gia, NEAC), which operates the national root certificate authority
  • Legal bases: Nghị định 78/2025/NĐ-CP on law-making (as amended by Nghị định 187/2025/NĐ-CP), Nghị định 23/2025/NĐ-CP of 21 February 2025 on electronic signatures and trust services, and Nghị định 225/2026/NĐ-CP of 24 June 2026 on the ministry’s functions and structure
  • Length: two articles (Điều 1 repeals, Điều 2 sets the effective date)

What is repealed

Điều 1 repeals three circulars in full:

  1. Thông tư 37/2009/TT-BTTTT (14 December 2009): dossiers and procedures for licensing, registering and recognising digital-signature certification providers. It was written to implement Nghị định 26/2007/NĐ-CP, a decree replaced in 2018 by Nghị định 130/2018/NĐ-CP.
  2. Thông tư 08/2011/TT-BTTTT (31 March 2011): an amendment to Thông tư 37/2009 covering the same procedures.
  3. Thông tư 41/2017/TT-BTTTT (19 December 2017, effective 5 February 2018): the rules for using digital signatures on electronic documents in state agencies. It covered how officials and clerks sign, how an agency’s “seal key” (khóa bí mật con dấu) is held, how a certificate is checked against the CRL or OCSP all the way to the root CA, what validation data must be stored with a signed document, and the functions that signing and verification software must have.

The circular does not say what replaces each repealed text. That is normal for a pure repeal circular, but it means readers have to map the old rules to the new regime themselves.

What governs e-signing instead

  • Licensing of providers. Thông tư 37/2009 and 08/2011 described licensing dossiers that no longer exist under current law. Nghị định 23/2025, in force since 10 April 2025, sets the conditions for trust services in Điều 18 and the dossier and procedure for granting, re-granting, amending and extending a trust-service licence in Điều 19–21. The two old circulars had already been overtaken twice, by Nghị định 130/2018 and then by Nghị định 23/2025. This repeal removes them from the books.
  • Signing and checking. Nghị định 23/2025 now carries what Thông tư 41/2017 used to say about signing and verification. Điều 15 obliges a signer to check the validity status of their own certificate, and of the issuing CA’s, before signing. Điều 16 obliges a recipient to check validity at the time of signing, including on the national root CA’s system, and makes the recipient liable when they skip those checks or accept a certificate they know was suspended or revoked. Điều 13–14 cover certificates for agencies, organisations and authorised individuals, and make signing “on behalf of” or “by order of” legally equivalent to signing by the person whose title appears on the certificate.
  • Software. Điều 17 of Nghị định 23/2025 lists the required functions of signing and verification software and bans technical barriers that stop anyone from verifying a signature. The detailed technical requirements are in Thông tư 15/2025/TT-BKHCN (15 August 2025, effective on signing), which replaced Thông tư 22/2020/TT-BTTTT. It requires software to check certificate validity before letting a user sign and to support timestamps.

Who is affected

  • State agencies and public-service units. Their internal signing procedures and IT documentation probably still cite Thông tư 41/2017. From 15 November those citations point to a dead text. Signatures made in the meantime remain valid. The task is to update internal regulations so they rest on Nghị định 23/2025 and Thông tư 15/2025, and on Nghị định 68/2024/NĐ-CP where the agency uses public-duty digital signatures (chữ ký số chuyên dùng công vụ). How a signature is displayed on an administrative document is still governed by the clerical-work decree, Nghị định 30/2020/NĐ-CP. Thông tư 41/2017 only referred to it.
  • Vendors of e-office and document-management software. Many tender specifications and acceptance checklists for e-office software still quote the functional list in Điều 11–12 of Thông tư 41/2017. Bids and audits should now cite Điều 17 of Nghị định 23/2025 and Thông tư 15/2025. A separate deadline matters more than the repeal itself: Điều 47 khoản 6 of Nghị định 23/2025 gave application software that embeds signing or verification components two years from 10 April 2025 to be upgraded to the Điều 17 requirements. That is 10 April 2027, about five months after this repeal takes effect.
  • Certification providers. For licensed CAs nothing changes in practice. Their licensing has run under Nghị định 23/2025 since April 2025. Thông tư 59 only removes the conflicting old procedure texts.
  • Businesses and individuals. For anyone signing invoices, tax filings or contracts with a public digital signature, nothing changes. The repeal does not affect certificates, keys or the legal value of documents already signed.

Why it matters

Vietnam’s 2025 government restructuring left many ministries holding circulars issued by bodies that no longer exist. The Ministry of Science and Technology has been replacing or repealing old TT-BTTTT instruments one at a time. Thông tư 59 is a clean-up of that kind. It is still useful, because Thông tư 41/2017 was the one rulebook that set out, step by step, how a Vietnamese state document is digitally signed and checked. Those requirements now sit at decree level and apply to everyone, not just state agencies.

Open questions

  • Thông tư 41/2017’s state-specific rules. Some provisions have no clear match in Nghị định 23/2025. Examples are the duty to hand the agency’s seal key to the clerk (văn thư), to keep the key device at the agency’s premises, and the list of validation data stored with sent and received documents. Agencies will need to cover these in their own internal rules, or wait for guidance under the e-transactions rules for state agencies (Nghị định 137/2024/NĐ-CP).
  • Classified documents. Thông tư 41/2017 excluded documents containing state secrets. That area stays with the cipher and public-duty signature regime and is not affected by this repeal.
  • More repeals. The heading “repeal some circulars” suggests the ministry is clearing the e-signature field in batches. Other TT-BTTTT instruments on digital signatures, such as the standards and certification-policy circulars, may follow.

Sources

This post is general information, not legal advice.