Korean Job Discussion Forums

[nicwr2002]

I was told this after my first year of teaching, that using cash would cause me to owe money to the tax office. Well this past year I tried to use my card as much as possible, but there have been a few times were I had to take out large sums of money in cash. Does anyone have any experience with how much you can take out and not have to owe money? My first year I had to pay something like 300k. I was hoping for a tax return this year, but now I'm wondering if I'm going to have to pay again.

[big_fella1]

[Weigookin74]

Isn't it really stupid? The government just trying to tell you how to spend your money? Why not just charge a simple rate and then tell folks, it's your own money and you spend it however you dang well please. We don't care.


Anyways, your debit card can be totaled up at the end of the year. There's a site you go to with your online banking ID and print it out. yesign.com or something like that? All your debit transactions will be there. You can give that to your boss or the tax office and reduce some payment.

[nicwr2002]

[schwa]

It sounds like a way complicated system to have to collect receipts every day to save maybe a couple hundred bucks at the end of the year.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[nicwr2002]

[nora]

you get a cash receipt card and swipe that every time you use cash.

you register your phone number and give the number to the clerk when you use cash.

you register your bank account for when you use your card.

it's actually a pretty simple system. if you studied accounting 101, it's pretty much a double entry system - you make an entry in your account, and the store makes the same entry in their account.

The purpose of the system is to help catch tax cheats. in a country that uses cash so much and offers discounts to people who use cash, tax evasion is a serious problem. that's why it's in your best interest to participate. if you demand a cash receipt from a place, and they refuse to give you one, you can report them and get a nice reward - 500k for every case that is proven.

Myself, I got about 700,000k back last year on my taxes. the majority of that was education deductions, but about 150k of that was cash receipt deductions. so yeah, it works out to about 12,500 a month, but considering it takes you all of 10 seconds at the register to give your phone number, why not do it?

[atwood]

The whole point of this tax system was to increase consumerism and the use of credit cards in Korea. It has obviously been very successful. The percentage of taxes refunded on such purchases has decreased over time.

Taxation is often used to encourage or discourage certain behaviors. Now if they would hurry up and increase the cigarette tax.

[schwa]

[Weigookin74]

[drydell]

Nora was right. It was brought in because of tax evasion. Particularly small businesses were hiding profits and not paying tax on a huge scale in SK. It simply offers a tax-back incentive for consumers to use credit cards all the time to prevent this happening so much..

The big drawback for me is that I spend much more using credit cards - easier to overspend - rather than taking out a certain amount of cash to stick to every month. So I think overall there is probably not much net gain.

[atwood]