Private tax platforms now handle roughly 60% of all tax refund claims in South Korea, raising the prospect of a breakdown in Hometax, the government's national tax filing network. The National Tax Service, worried that the volume of traffic could crash the system, has urgently asked lawmakers for authority to regulate the platforms. But the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the agency overseeing tax policy, has pushed back, calling the measure excessive regulation of a new industry. Critics say the government is leaving a public system used by tens of millions of people exposed to failure and inviting chaos during the coming year-end tax settlement season.
Refund Claims 60% Platform-Driven as Hometax Stalls, Tax Agency Presses for Law
The gap between the two agencies surfaced during a subcommittee review, political sources said on the 16th. At an Oct. 1 meeting of the tax subcommittee of the National Assembly's Finance and Economy Committee, lawmakers took up a partial revision to the Framework Act on National Taxes sponsored by Cho Seung-rae, the committee chair and a member of the Democratic Party of Korea. The bill would give the commissioner of the National Tax Service a legal basis to issue administrative guidance to operators of private tax filing support services, requiring them to maintain technical stability and barring false or exaggerated claims.
The push for legal authority over private platforms comes as services such as SamJeomSam have come to account for more than half of the traffic on the national tax network. According to materials prepared for the subcommittee, 880,000 of the 1.5 million refund claims filed in 2025, or 59%, were submitted through private tax platforms. In effect, platform traffic now drives more than half of the country's tax administration.
The concern is that these platforms, in checking expected refunds for customers and filing on their behalf, run large-scale, indiscriminate data scraping against National Tax Service servers, overloading the system. In May last year, during the regular comprehensive income tax filing period, a surge of platform-driven traffic knocked Hometax offline, an unprecedented disruption. The Ministry of Economy and Finance also acknowledged the outage, saying taxpayers faced enormous inconvenience and that some were unable to file by the comprehensive income tax deadline.
The National Tax Service, recognizing the severity of the problem, concluded that it urgently needed at least a minimal legal framework to control unchecked platform access. The finance ministry confirmed as much, saying the tax agency agrees that some degree of regulation of tax platforms is needed to protect taxpayers and that the bill itself was requested directly by the National Tax Service.
Finance Ministry Opposition Shelves Bill, Raising Alarm Before Year-End Settlement
The finance ministry, which holds the key to passage, formally opposed the bill at the subcommittee. As a result, the revision failed to clear the subcommittee and was held over for continued review.
The ministry's objections fall into three parts. First, it argued that a basis for administrative guidance already exists as a general provision under the Administrative Procedures Act, leaving little practical benefit in spelling it out separately in the Framework Act on National Taxes, a special statute. It also said penalties for exaggerated or misleading platform advertising already exist in the Certified Tax Accountant Act, which was revised last year. Going further, the ministry official cited the dispute between the Korean Bar Association and the legal platform Lawtalk, arguing that since the Ministry of Justice guides the matter through internal administrative rules, self-regulation through guidelines would be more reasonable than hastily writing the requirements into law.
Tax professionals and experts say the ministry's reasoning misses the point entirely. Putting the risk of a national tax network failure on the same footing as the Lawtalk case, a turf fight between professions, makes no sense, they argue. The Lawtalk dispute centered on advertising rules between a bar group and a platform. The tax platform issue, by contrast, involves repeated large-scale access to the central government's tax collection network using the sensitive tax information of tens of millions of citizens, making it a question of public infrastructure security.
Lawmakers also criticized the ministry's approach during the subcommittee review. Rep. Lee Choon-suak of the Democratic Party said the argument that it is improper to create a separate provision in a special statute simply because the Administrative Procedures Act contains a general provision does not hold. "Given that the purpose of the law is to shift to a preventive remedy system, this is a necessary and good law from the public's standpoint," the lawmaker said. "Spelling it out clearly in law gives it stronger legal force." The point, the lawmaker argued, is that the physical stability of the national tax network cannot be left to platform self-regulation or broad guidelines alone.
With the finance ministry's resistance delaying enforceable legal grounds for control, alarm is growing among practitioners. If a second Hometax outage occurs during the year-end tax settlement season now just ahead, which salaried workers call their 13th-month paycheck, or during the comprehensive income tax filing period next May, tax collection would be disrupted and ordinary taxpayers would face substantial harm.