Han Dong-hoon Renews Push to Defer Korea’s Digital Asset Tax Due in January

The Other Income Problem

The deferral question returned to center stage on Thursday when independent lawmaker Han Dong-hoon published a Facebook post arguing that South Korea should postpone taxation of digital assets rather than enforce the current design. The post, titled a demand to settle the deferment without more dithering, landed hours before a National Assembly audit in which the government was pressed on the same issue. Han referenced Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Lee Hyeong-il’s testimony that he would deliberate the tax as carefully as possible, and wrote that such deliberation must end in deferment.

His objections come in three layers. The current framework classifies transfers and lending of digital assets as other income, a category Han says cannot absorb exchange-to-exchange transfers, cold wallet custody, staking rewards, airdrops, assets received through hard forks, DeFi returns or token swaps in an ecosystem he described as complex and still evolving. He wants phase-two digital asset legislation first, so that coin types and the character of each income stream are defined and investor protection is in place before tax bills are issued. He also argues that the financial investment income tax, which was to apply to stock and bond gains, was scrapped, so taxing digital assets alone breaks tax equity, while losses earn no carryforward relief and gift-based avoidance remains unguarded.

A timing argument closes his case. Because jurisdictions will activate the international exchange of crypto tax data, known as CARF, on different schedules, he predicted, taxpayers will move assets overseas or into cold wallets before year-end and never bring them back, collapsing the taxpayer counts the government projects from pre-tax data. The government has noted that few taxpayers exceed 2.5 million won in annual income; Han’s reply was that a tax does not become fair merely because few people pay it.

Parties Split at the Thursday Audit

The same dispute filled the National Assembly’s Planning and Finance Committee audit of the finance ministry on Thursday. The tax was legislated through a 2020 revision of the Income Tax Act, has been postponed three times since, and under the present schedule takes effect in January next year. The government is still running the administrative procedures that date requires, while industry voices call the timetable premature.

According to Coinreaders’ account of the hearing, the ruling Democratic Party urged fast enforcement and defended the January start. Representative Yoon Hu-deok told the ministry that the United States, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom already tax digital assets and that 48 countries now collect such taxes. The same preparation promises, he said, have been repeated at every deferral since the concerns were first raised years ago. Reversing a law that the Assembly passed in a plenary vote, he warned, would shake the foundation on which the state itself operates.

The opposition People Power Party answered that the groundwork does not exist. Representative Im I-ja said tax equity was collapsing because domestic platforms can be assessed while overseas venues, including the best crypto exchanges globally, owe Korea no transaction records. She asked what readiness could be claimed when the legal taxation standards and the administrative infrastructure both remain insufficient, citing industry statements that operators need six to nine months to build the reporting infrastructure required by the National Tax Service’s notices. Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hyeong-il replied that he had already promised at the previous audit to consult experts and industry, and told the committee he would gather the views of the industry and of the Assembly and weigh them as fully as possible before reaching a judgment. No verdict came from the hearing itself: the answer stopped short of committing to either enforcement or a fourth deferral.

The Six-to-Nine-Month Infrastructure Gap

What happens next reduces to one calendar. If operators genuinely need six to nine months to build reporting infrastructure under the tax authority’s notices, a January start is arithmetically hard to defend unless the ministry judges the work closer to done than the opposition claims, and the choice must be made within weeks. In our reading, the equity argument will carry the day: the repeal of the financial investment income tax removed the parallel treatment that justified taxing digital assets alone, and that fiscal point, not the sectoral complaints, is what the deputy prime minister’s careful wording leaves room for. As activity migrates across cross-chain bridges and into self-custody ahead of staggered CARF adoption abroad, the cost of waiting also rises for the deferral camp.