Slashdot Mirror
South Korea Now Officially Taxing Virtual Worlds
Next Generation is reporting that the South Korean government's goal to get their cut of the real money transfer industry is now in the works. Folks who sell over $6,500 worth of virtual goods or currency in a given year will have an automatic Value Added Tax (VAT) withdrawn by the service they contract through. That is, the middleman service will remove taxes automatically for these repeat customers. If a South Korean sells over $13,000 worth of goods or currency in a given year, the government considers them a small business. As such, individuals in that position are required to obtain a business license and take care of taxes themselves. "An NTS official claims the organization will be able to monitor all transactions as RTM mediators have agreed to share clients' transaction details with the authorities. 'NTS would be able to track all transactions for taxation of virtual items,' Mr. Choi said. 'This is not about defining RMT legal/illegal; we don't see any contradictory facts to Amendment for Game Industry Promoting Law - we are not about to judge if RMT is legal or not,' he added."
They're taxing real money that people make for selling virtual goods.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
... and frankly, US tax law already handles the situation, but it is up to the individual to report their income.
South Korea simply made a law that requires the transaction service being used to apply the tax.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_Uni ted_States
The terms of services say the items and currency = $0 and the taxes are applied by middle-man?
so if you use ebay that you don't have to pay the tax?
also what games like Second Life where you buy and sell from the people running / making the game with out a middle man?
Virtual worlds are now officially taxing you!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Maybe I missed something, but...
[this] is not about defining RMT legal/illegal
Ummm.. can you tax illegal money transfer? And, like, imprison a thief for tax evasion along with, say, robbery? If they're taxing it, doesn't it HAVE to be legal?
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I'd hate to see what North Korea has in mind!
Not 79? Surely you mean 79 14 year olds. Methinks you have miscounted. Can't possibly be 80.
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Actually the exact opposite is probably true. Most newspapers, at least in the western world, discovered around the start of the 20'th century that it pays to at least pretend to be impartial. Yes, they still aren't really impartial, and they still kept their opinion columns (although at least now they're more or less marked as such, and not as hard news) but they're a lot more subtle in their manipulation than that.
It's not even as much doing the morally right thing, it's just business. At some point the public as a whole was largely fed up with the hyperbole- and libel-ladden pieces of journalism and pamphlets of the 19'th century. So someone discovered, much to their surprise, that they actually have more readers if they just report the news, instead of fabricating it or outright telling people what to think about it.
Again, I'm aware it's still nowhere near perfect, and even "impartiality" means something slightly different to the media than to the rest of us. I'm not entirely naive, trust me. I'm just saying it used to be a lot worse. "Protocols of the Elders Of Zion" kinda bad, or claiming that Lincoln was at the head of some subversive African conspiracy. Inventing ridiculous super-villain-type plans of your opponents (e.g., that they're actually proposing building sewers or a subway so they can blow their own capital up from below, when their Illuminati masters order it) used to be just business as usual.
At any rate, nowadays an actual printed newspaper would be a lot less blatantly inflammatory there. Even if they wanted to manipulate you into being for or against it (which actually newspapers themselves don't often do, but is often is the case with PR pieces submitted as news), they'd work hard into making it look like they just gave you the data and you reached the "whoa, it's evil" conclusion yourself. Especially in PR there are people damn skilled at _not_ looking blatantly partisan. It would involve some interviews, some impartial study maybe, and in "journalistic impartiality" tradition it would involve two conflicting points of view, and they're not telling you which of the two to believe. (Just incidentally the one pro-taxing ends up saying the wrong things, and causing a "well, I'm not siding with _this_ guy" reaction.)
Unfortunately, (or maybe fortunately, you can choose) Slashdot stories are rarely submitted by real journalists. They're _usually_ submitted by nerds who never figured the "pretend to not tell people what to think" part, so they outright go ahead and do that. Some (though not all) even have an axe to grind, an ideological crusade to fight, and a messiah complex to save you all from the evil corporations/government/current-economic-model/wh
It's not like it's the first time anything like this happened, anyway.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
EDs already exist, and they're called dollars. This ED scheme is no different than if you had a dollar-denominated account at the exchange, and dividends simply credited your account with a USD amount, which you could cash out at will or have it credited to any debts you incurred with the exchange.
Or to put it another way: dollars, in the general case, exist as credits to accounts. You don't have to be given actual dollar bills for that to count as income; it is sufficient that some account that you own be credited for some amount. Giving you an ED nothing more than crediting one dollar to your account.
To make the example interesting, the EDs simply can't have the exact same value, liquidity and lack of risk as dollars, a condition that can't hold as long as each ED is backed by one dollar. Institute limited supply and a floating exchange rate, and then things start getting interesting. You get something like forex trading, in which you are indeed taxed when you convert your gains to USD.
Are you adequate?
An ED is a security that gives its holder ownership interest on a dollar in some account that the ED issuer owns, without allowing the issuer to use or dispose of the dollar in any other way than paying the ED holder. If you own an ED, you indirectly own the dollar that backs that ED, period. If you come to own a dollar you didn't own before, that's called "income."
Are you adequate?
They outsource/move their farming operations outside of SKorea.How they will be taxed?
The people making money from this are usually well organized.
I like that they are not going to make RMT illegal, at least in South Korea - because with all the negative focus on RMT recently I frankly had a scary feeling that it'd end up being just a nother limitation on a long list of unnecessary subduement. Let's hope our own politcians are just as wise.
HR&R Block will be starting up a server in WoW every March. All characters will be required to finish the "Form 1040" quest.
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