South Korean National Tax Service Investigates Illegal Internet Gambling

South Korea’s National Tax Service is auditing eighteen celebrities and businessmen accused of embezzling and avoiding taxes to wager abroad.

While South Korean gambling laws are not as restrictive as they once were, South Korea’s tax law doesn’t allow national residents to duplicitously hide the behavior and winnings with false claims. Now, a spokesman for the National Tax Service asserted that a few of these are believed to have gambled either in Macau, China or in Las Vegas, Nevada with business capital after manipulating accounts records.

The owner of the service company is under suspicion for dodging taxes by failing to report profits for their company’s foreign divisions; moreover, it is thought that he personally spend money wagering in Macau.

In another instance, a controller for a manufacturing plant obtained gambling funds by claiming charges to his corporate credit card were for “business trips”.

Both these individuals and the companies that they are poorly representing are now under scrutiny. The tax authority is promising serious fines against any confirmed tax dodgers, regardless whether they visited online casinos in South Korea. Furthermore, the NTS is now contemplating enlarging the scale of this investigation to include the middle-sized business owners.

In the previous year, NTS opened the “Overseas Tax Evasion Reporting Center”, an online service, as a response to increasingly sophisticated personal and corporate tax evasion strategies. Reports on residents who engage in online gambling in South Korea and overseas fall into a large scope of behaviors affiliated with tax evasion.