The Seoul Footnote

The Scene An heir in Ohio learns that her father died in Seoul on 3 March. Within a week she has found four English-language summaries of Korean inheritance tax, and all four say the same thing: the return is due six months after death. She writes 3 September on the calendar, blocks out August for the paperwork, and stops worrying about the date. The date is wrong, and it is wrong in the direction that rarely causes trouble. The Inheritance Tax and Gift Tax Act (상속세 및 증여세법) does not count six months from the day the inheritance commenced. It counts six months from the last day of the month in which the inheritance commenced. For a death on 3 March the clock starts on 31 March, and the return is due 30 September — twenty-seven days later than the calendar she drew up. The same construction governs gift tax in the next article, with three months instead of six. Neither article measures from the event. Both measure from the end of the event's month, which produces two consequen...

The Scene A parent in Seoul wires 50 million won to an adult daughter so she can close on a jeonse deposit. Someone at the family dinner supplies the rule of thumb that circulates in expatriate forums and in Korean ones alike: that much is tax-free, and the same amount can be sent again next year. Two years later a second transfer goes out on that understanding, and nobody files anything. There is no annual gift allowance in Korean tax law. The phrase has no counterpart in the statute, and the structure the statute does use runs on a different axis entirely. The Inheritance Tax and Gift Tax Act (상속세 및 증여세법) sets a deduction ceiling that is measured backwards across ten years from the date of each gift, and it measures that ceiling by the relationship between donor and donee rather than by the calendar. A separate article then reaches back over the same ten years and pulls earlier gifts from the same donor into the tax base of the later one. Those two mechanisms are frequently col...

The Scene Korean drama returns often to one room. A founder has died, the family sits down with a lawyer, and someone says out loud that the shares cannot be kept without selling part of them first. English-language coverage of real Korean successions supplies the caption almost automatically, and the caption tends to be the same one: Korea taxes inheritance at 60 percent, the highest rate anywhere. The rate schedule in Korean law does not contain 60. Its last row is 50. The 60 is produced somewhere else in the same Act — in a valuation provision that instructs an assessor to increase the value of certain shares by one fifth before the rate table is opened at all. The two provisions sit 37 articles apart, and the gap between them is where most English explanations stop. Two different articles, applied in a fixed order The premium is applied to the value. The rate is applied afterwards, to what is left after deductions. Step 1 — Value the property Art...