One of the most serious socio-economic problems facing our society may be the real estate problem charcterized by rapid rise of housing prices and spread of real estate speculation. Meanwhile, our society has suffered much from various real estate pro...
One of the most serious socio-economic problems facing our society may be the real estate problem charcterized by rapid rise of housing prices and spread of real estate speculation. Meanwhile, our society has suffered much from various real estate problems. Nevertheless, our real estate policies hanv consisted of a variety of real estate tax policies and regulations of land use in order to achieve some emergency goals, namely check rising real estate prices and increasing real estate speculations in a shorter term. However, it has been criticized that such government's policies would result in a vicious cycle of rpread of speculation, checking of speculation, recession of economy, measures for economic recovery and facilitation of speculation, and that contrary to government's efforts, the real estate prices used to rise rapidly cyclically, hanving the target regions of speculation spread nation-wide.
The real estate transacion declaration system designed to root out such real estate speculations specifies that the actual price of the real estate transacted should be reported as reference of tax to the authority, and that such actual price should be recorded on the registry for transparent real estate transaction and prevention of real estate speculation. However, as Real-Name Real Estate Law announced on August 31,2005 began to be implemented since January 1,2006, the real estate markets would suffer from the relatively heavy real estate tax rates, and thus, real estate transactions would decrease much.
The governmetn has operated the real estate transaction declaration system in an effort to oblige the parties concerned to report to the authority about the actual real estate transaction prices and therby, remedy such wrong practices causing real estate speculations and tas evasions as preparation of dual contracts and thus, make transparent the real estate transactions.
Under the real estate transaction declaration system, the parties concerned or the real estate broker is obliged to report the actual transaction price to the authority-city, county or ward office-via Internet or personal contact. The reported prices will be verified by the authority, and if verified, they will be referred to National Tax Service (tax office hanvin jurisdiction) and city, countyor ward office to be tax bases for national and local taxes. And such data will be recorded on the registry to be used for future taxation on the real estate.
Acquisition and registration taxes are levied according to the actual transaction prices, but their burden are not thought to be heavy, because the government has lowered their rates gradually.
In case of the capital gain tax, however, tax payers have resisted much to it becausej the capital gain tax began to be levied based on the actualtransaction prices since 2007 only to increase the tax burden; until 2006, it had been levied based on the reference market prices.
In order to levy tax based on the actual real estate transaction prices, it is essential to calculate the precise capital gain at the time of transaction based on the tax data collected at the time of acquisition of the real estate, but the current provisions specify that such calculation should apply to the real estates acquired after the date when the amended law began to be implemented. So, it is demmed desirable to apply both criteria of reference market prices and actual transaction prices to the capital gain tax in parallel for a considerable period of time.
On the other hand, those households owning a single house are exempt from the capital gain tax if the house is priced at 600 million won or below. Namely, only the portion of the price exceeding this ceiling would be subject to the capital gain tax, which may cause various problems in view of the principle of fair taxation. In such a case, the principle of fair taxation may well be unjustified because those owning many cheap houses are subject to the heavy capital gain tax as high as 50%, while those owning an expensive single house may be free from the capital gain tax. Therefore, it is necessary to narrow the scope of tax exemptions, while inducing the parties concerned to report their actual transaction prices to the authority.
In most of advanced nation, the capital gain tax is levied on the incomes summed up for a certaion period, but in Korea, it is levied depending on the period of ownership and number of houses. Since the tax policies are effective in checking the speculative demands for real estates, it is demmed necessary to reinforce the tax systems to some extent to check real estate speculations. However, at the moment, heavier real estate taxes would provoke a serious resistance to them on the part fof tax payers. Because any policy should face a reaction, the side-effects of the distorted market economy should be taken into consideration sufficiently. Hence, it is conceived that if the real estate tax systems should be operated according to the pvinciples of neutral taxation and market economy, minimizing their side-effcets, the real estate markets would be stabilized as expected by the government.
All in all, with such problems kept in mind, this study was aimed at addressing the problems of the real estate tax systems through legal, economic and policy-wise analysis, and thereby, suggesting their effective solutions.