This was reported by the news site The Korea Times, with an article published today; According to reports from the local information body in English, therefore, the Ministry of Economy and Finance of South Korea is considering the possibility of imposing a 20% tax on income deriving from cryptocurrency trading.
The source cited by The Korea Times, however, is anonymous, therefore the news must be taken with pliers, the fact is that if this were indeed the case, the South Korean revenue agency would have started to study, on a mandate from the ministry, a tax that would strike the capital gains realized with cryptocurrency trading; this kind of rumors have followed one another since the beginning of the year and sincerely it is not surprising that a country like South Korea, which already has a regulatory framework among the most advanced in the world as regards the cryptocurrency market, may now introduce some form of taxation on capital gains resulting from the negotiation of crypto assets.
Unlike what happens in Europe, where we have limited ourselves to equating the trading of cryptocurrencies to forex without setting up an adequate regulatory framework, South Korea, more seriously, first prepared this regulatory framework and now, always assuming that the rumors prove to be true, he would be seriously considering taxing investments in this asset class.
To date, in fact, the government has limited itself to taxing the exchanges directly, with the result that the main exchange of cryptocurrencies at the local level, Bithumb, has announced its intention to initiate an administrative dispute against the request to pay 68.9 million dollars to the South Korean tax authorities, which however the exchange believes does not have a legal basis; however the matter evolves, I think that introducing a form of taxation on cryptocurrency trading is correct and necessary, but only on condition that there is regulatory clarity.
It is therefore, in other words, more than legitimate that countries such as South Korea or Japan, but also the United States themselves, require the payment of taxes on the capital gains made by operating with the crypto, but only because these countries have protected themselves to put operators in a position to do so; on the other hand, if we look at the Italian situation, where there is also a tax on the realized capital gains, what we see is that the Italian tax authorities on the one hand demand the payment of a tax identical to that applied to forex (26% on the capital gains) from the however, other rejects any document the cryptocurrency traders present to attest these capital gains.
Since the main exchanges do not provide an annual bank statement of the operations performed, therefore, it is that the revenue agency is not satisfied that the taxpayer prints the history of its operations from the platform, considering this type of document invalid, the taxpayer Italian is always and in any case unable to prove the origin of his funds and, in the event of disputes, he will always and in any case be wrong with the risk of being charged with a charge for money laundering as has already happened to some people.
The problem, of course, arises only for those who move important volumes of money, there is certainly no risk of a charge of money laundering for a few hundred euros, however it is unacceptable that governments make claims of any kind towards those who work with cryptocurrencies if not before they do their job, which is precisely to clearly regulate the sector.
