무기명채권의 암묵적 조세와 조세정책적 시사점

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The main purposes of this study are to document the existence and the magnitude of implicit taxes related to bonds without real names in the Korean bond market, and to present some tax policy implications based on the results. The tax benefit of these bonds is that if held until maturity, the investors are exempt from paying gift or estate taxes. This tax benefit is expected to lower the before-tax rate of return on the bonds, and thus to bring about implicit taxes. This study estimates that investors had legally avoided ￦697.8 billion of taxes by purchasing the ￦4 trillion bonds without real names issued in 1998, and also that they paid implicit taxes amounting to ￦1 trillion and 245.5 billion. This is equivalent to paying gift taxes at 31%. This result provides important policy implications. First, bonds without real names suppress the progressiveness of tax rate structure with the highest rate of 45%, hampering tax equity. This is similar to a clientele-based tax arbitrage which allows taxpayers to convert high explicit tax rate to a low implicit tax rate. That bonds without real names flatten the progressiveness of tax rate structure implies that the coupon rates of these bonds should be carefully determined at the time of issuance. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the issuance of bonds without real names could be an alternative way of directly collecting gift taxes, which is an imperfect and costly means of enforcing tax laws. If the tax agency is not very effective in enforcing the law, the issuance of bonds without real names permits the agency to collect taxes equal to implicit taxes at the minimum. Even if the agency is highly effective, these bonds have a merit of saving substantial amount of enforcement costs. For ￦4 trillion bonds, investors were estimated to be incurred ￦1 trillion and 245.5 billion implicit taxes. To collect this much gift tax, the agency must identify ￦2 trillion and 767.8 billion worth of gift transactions, even assuming that the highest tax rate can be applied to all the transactions. This implies that the agency must be able to identify gift transactions with approximately 70% probability. If a lower tax rate is applied, a higher probability is required, and the enforcement costs would become much greater.