Number of People with Taxable Income over 500 Million Won Has Doubled

The number of people with taxable income of more than 500 million won from the total tax base has increased by about 90 percent in the last three years, and also the number of people whose taxable income is less than 10 million won has increased by 27 percent. Also, “the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer” phenomenon has deepened as in 2003, the top 10 percent of the subjects of the global income tax accounts for more than half (53.1 percent) of the total income for the first time.

According to the “Annual report of national tax statistics,” released by National Tax Service, the number of people whose taxable income exceeds 500 million won from the total tax base has increased by 89.9 percent from 1,910 in 2000 to 3,627 in 2003.

Also, the rate that these people constitute of all global income tax payers has increased from 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent, and the rate of their tax payments has increased from 16.9 percent (922.5 billion won) to 22.6 percent (1.6396 trillion won).

At the same time, the rate of the lowest level tax payers whose taxable income is less than 10 million won has increased from 63.5 percent (969,847 tax payers) to 64.9 percent (1,236,659 tax payers).

However, the rate of their tax payments has decreased from 6.3 percent (341.6 billion won) to 5.4 percent (391.3 billion won).

Especially, according to the distribution chart of the global income tax, the number of people at the top 10 percent level has increased by 30 percent, from 161,624 tax payers in 2000 to 211,453 tax payers in 2003.

In the meanwhile, the number of people who received more than an 80 million won annual salary has increased from 21,000 at the end of 2000 to 31,000 at the end of 2003.

Jae-Seong Hwang jsonhng@donga.com