현행 지주회사 과세체계의 문제점 및 개선방안

Abstract

In December 2000, the Special Tax Treatment Control Law was passed to promote the establishment of holding companies in order to encourage corporate restructuring and to promote corporate transparency. The purpose of this article is to review tax regulations related to holding companies and the history of the relevant regulation amendments in order to find out problems in the application of such regulations in practice, and to provide recommendations in this regard. The present problems and recommendation of the regulations related to holding companies are as follows. Firstly, a major income source of a holding company is the dividend from its subsidiary. However, double taxation issue occurs as the aforementioned income has already been taxed of corporate tax on its subsidiary. Though excluding some portion of dividends from taxable income for holding companies introduced to address double taxation issue, ‘a holding company’ mentioned here denotes a holding company defined under the Fair Trade Law. Because a holding company means‘a large-scale’ holding company under the Fair Trade Law, small-scale holding companies could be discriminated due to non-application of aforementioned special tax treatment. Thereby, a new tax system designed to support holding companies from the perspective of the neutrality of tax system should be developed, instead of applying the definition prescribed by the Fair Trade Law. Secondly, if a company does not meet the requirements at the time of corporate spin-off during the course of switch to the holding company, the acquisition tax would be imposed on the oligopoly stockholders of the invested company. Thirdly, the adoption of the consolidated tax returns system should certainly be discussed in depth to resolve double taxation issue and to enhance fairness of tax burden among pre spin-off, post spin-off and holding company.