Park Soo-young Urges Democratic Party to Set Digital Asset Tax Deferral Line

Park Soo-young Presses for a Party Line on Tax Deferral

People Power Party lawmaker Park Soo-young on Wednesday called on South Korea's ruling Democratic Party to adopt a formal party position on deferring the digital asset income tax scheduled to take effect in January 2027. Speaking at a press conference held with young investors in the National Assembly's communication lounge, Park said the deferral movement inside the ruling camp, led by Democratic legislator Min Byeong-deok's own deferral bill, has not yet risen to the level of party policy. Without that collective position, he argued, nobody can predict how next month's review of the relevant bills will end. Park said his party will of course attempt cross-party consultation, but that with the Democratic Party not yet assembled around a single line, the outcome is genuinely uncertain. His fairness case rests on a comparison with equities: the financial investment income tax on stock gains was abolished, yet digital assets alone would face a separate income tax, and Park said lawmakers should not kick away the ladder of asset formation for young investors. He paired that with a readiness critique aimed at the government. The taxable base and revenue estimates remain unknown, the detailed assessment criteria have not been finalized, and the tax systems at the country's five major exchanges are still incomplete, he said. In his reading, pushing ahead without mechanisms such as loss carryforward would impose an unreasonable burden on investors. Park had already flagged the exchange readiness gap at a National Assembly audit of the Strategy and Finance Committee on 2026-10-13, where he disclosed the buildout status of each exchange's tax system.

A 54,000-Signature Petition and the Loss Carryforward Gap

The press conference gave young investors a platform to set out why they want a two-year deferral rather than outright abolition. Cho Sang-hyuk, who runs a digital asset community and filed the National Assembly petition on the issue, said roughly 54,000 people had signed it, and six investors joined Park at the event. Cho was explicit that the demand is not refusal to pay: the point, he said, is to build a system that lets people calculate and file accurately and fairly. The group listed four structural problems. Losses cannot be carried forward between years, losses in traditional finance assets such as stocks cannot be offset against digital asset gains, the tax treatment of futures, options and airdrops is unclear, and Korean authorities will be able to verify domestic exchange records far better than offshore exchange or personal wallet activity. The carryforward example Cho gave is concrete. An investor who books a 45 million won loss in 2027 and a 50 million won gain in 2028 has a real net profit of 5 million won over the two years, yet under current rules the 2028 gain less the 2.5 million won basic deduction is taxed at 22% including local income tax, producing a bill of about 10.45 million won. Proving acquisition cost is another pressure point: records tied to a wallet address can be impossible to reconstruct when an offshore exchange has closed or the purchase dates back years. Cho added that even with Korea joining the CARF information-sharing framework from 2027, staggered national schedules mean trades on offshore venues and hot wallets cannot be verified at the same standard as domestic trading, concentrating the burden on local exchange users and risking an outflow to foreign platforms. The investors' proposal is a two-year deferral, with a Digital Asset Basic Act in the first year and a redesigned tax framework in the second. Park's own camp has filed bills in parallel: Song Eon-seok would delete the digital asset income provisions from the income tax law, while Kim Sang-hun would push implementation back to January 2029.

The decisive variable is now the Democratic Party's internal deliberation, not the opposition. Two months before a January 2027 start date, the government still lacks finalized criteria, revenue estimates and complete exchange systems, and the ruling party holds enough seats to settle the question whenever it adopts a line. Min Byeong-deok's bill gives deferral advocates a legislative vehicle, but as Park noted, individual bills do not guarantee cross-party agreement in review. If implementation proceeds on the current design, the domestic-versus-offshore verification gap Cho described becomes a live migration risk for Korean trading volume rather than a theoretical objection.