가상자산에 대한 정부 세법 개정안의 평가 및 개선방안

The government’s amendment to this year’s tax law includes an income tax method for virtual assets with the aim of imposing income tax on income (or gains) from transactions of virtual assets such as bitcoin from October 2021. In other words, as Korea’s income tax law has adopted the taxation principle of “imposing tax on only the listed items in the law’, income (or gains) from transactions on virtual assets that have not been taxed so far will become enumerated as a type of ‘other income’ in the income tax law, but not to be added to the ‘aggregated income’ subject to progressive income tax rates. Similar to the capital gains of other assets such as stocks, a separation tax system will be applied to the income (or gains) from the transactions of virtual assets. In this paper, after analyzing the contents of such amendments, the contents are evaluated by dividing them into ‘tax treatment to residents’, ‘tax treatment to non-residents and foreign corporations’, and ‘other problems’, and alternatives to the problems are to be presented. Of course, in order to objectively evaluate the government’s amendment, a review of a number of domestic and foreign prior studies and comparative studies of the relevant foreign tax systems were also conducted. The key finding of this Study is that the government’s tax law amendment suggests that virtual asset income be taxed in a manner similar to the case of “capital gains” but that the income category be classified as “other income”. This income classification not only complicates the income tax system, but also poses significant problems such as causing unnecessary tax disputes, especially with regard to ‘taxation on non-residents and foreign corporations’. In this line, it is recommended that the government’s amendment proposal needs to be urgently revised or withdrawn. Correcting such confusing ‘other income category’ as ‘capital gains (or financial investment income category)’ is not urgent in the case of ‘taxation on residents’, but it is considered desirable to revise the income classification if possible. On the other hand, for the purpose of curing ‘other problems’, which refers to non-taxation of VAT or exemption of VAT, concrete alternatives need to be prepared with the aim of preparing the regular tax law amendments to be included in 2021’s tax amendment package of the government.