생명보험금의 상속재산성과 상속세 부과 문제

Abstract

When the policyholder of the life insurance settle a contract for his death, he generally input his ‘legal inheritor' as the beneficiary. Also Korean commercial code provide that when the policyholder omit the beneficiary or when the beneficiary dies before the insurant, the inheritor of insurant or the beneficiary will be the beneficiary of that insurance. Accordingly the problems concerning the inheritance of the life insurance appear continuously. Also there are the issues like the waiver of inheritance, levy of inheritance/estate tax, inclusion of insurance money as special gift, division of insurance money between the inheritors concerning the matter of whether insurance money should be included in inherited estate or not. Recently the constitutional court ruled that article 8 of inheritance tax and gift tax act providing the levy of inheritance tax on the insurance money is constitutional. This constitutional court decision solved many problems concerning the issue of inheritance of insurance money, providing that when the inheritor receives insurance as a beneficiary the insurance money is not included in the inheritance estate. And also ruled that even if the insurance money is the property of inheritor's levy of inheritance tax on it is reasonable due to equity of the taxation. Nevertheless the decision of the constitutional court is focused on certain case and certain provision, so there are still unsolved problems left. And possible cases concerning the life insurance and the inheritance estate are so diverse that we need to examine the details of the account and the discussed issues to understand the exact meaning of constitutional court decision. There are still many problems concerning the life insurance and the inheritance, and the issues will keep coming up. To solve the problem rightly we need to focus on the nature of the life insurance and constitu- tionality.