Interesting Move by Tax Service

February 27th, 2007 Jun Sok Huhh Posted in news |

National Tax Service(NTS), equivalent to IRS in US, announced that it had put a surcharge on a business person who had run an RMT company.

According to the announcement, he set a company in Seoul at late year 2003 and hired thousands of Chinese workers/gamers by his local employees. He paid them to make game money of Linage, Arden. In doing so, he used information such as resident registration numbers illegally taken. He had earned 9.6B KRW(1,000 KRW=1 USD) by re-selling of the Arden during around 2 years. The point is that he didn't pay any tax in profiting from RMT business.

An official concerned said, "Not real transaction, RMT is almost undetectable without voluntary self-reporting. We charged him 10.9B KRW for the corporation tax, income tax, value-added tax. Additionally, he was prosecuted for the evasion."

Recently, NTS has been investigating tax evasion of the high-income self-employed and professionals like lawyers, doctors(See this). So, Does NTS look the RMT business so 'legitimate' that there be a rightful obligation to pay tax?

* It is just like before the huge earthquake around RMT business in Korea. There have been so many pros and cons on this subject. Some of them are really interesting. I am going to deliver you the big picture of RMT argument. Sorry for my being so busy!