Delinquent Tax Notices Completely Changed After 20 Years... From Paper to Mobile Delivery

Improvement from Postal Mail to Mobile Text Service
Seoul City Enables Immediate Payment via Mobile... Expect Efficient Payment Encouragement, Personal Information Protection, and Paper Document Reduction

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Cheol-young] Seoul City announced on the 4th that it will change the method of notifying high-amount tax delinquents of their outstanding taxes from sending paper delinquency notices by mail, which has been used for 20 years, to sending notifications via mobile phones.

Until now, delinquency notices have been sent to the delinquent taxpayers' registered residential addresses. However, in the case of high-amount delinquents, most do not actually live at their registered addresses, so even if the delinquency notices are sent, they often do not receive them. There was also a risk of personal information leakage if others saw the paper delinquency notices left in the mailbox.

Additionally, printing and mailing paper delinquency notices incurred significant costs and burdened postal workers. There were also environmental issues related to printing paper notices. The Seoul City Tax Collection Division 38 has managed about 25,000 high-amount delinquents and annually sent about 200,000 printed delinquency notices 6 to 8 times through postal workers.

With this improvement to sending delinquency notifications via mobile phones, Seoul City expects accurate and prompt delivery of delinquency notices, and delinquent taxes can also be paid via mobile, enabling more efficient tax collection operations. However, paper delinquency notices will still be sent to delinquents who do not have a mobile phone registered in their name, corporate delinquents, and those who own 2G phones.

When a delinquent taxpayer receives the delinquency notice via mobile, they can easily check the delinquency details and the contact number of the assigned investigator. After receiving the message, by consenting to receive and completing identity verification, they can check detailed delinquency information and pay their delinquent taxes anytime and anywhere without visiting a bank, using Seoul City's mobile ETAX, the Seoul City tax payment app (STAX), bank transfer, credit card, or simple payment methods.

Meanwhile, Seoul City plans to expand the delinquency notification text message service to 25 autonomous districts and other non-tax revenue delinquency collection tasks. It will also send welfare support linkage notices for livelihood-type low-income delinquents and payment guidance notices for foreign delinquent taxpayers written in English, Chinese, and other languages.

Lee Byung-han, Director of Seoul City’s Finance Bureau, said, “This delinquency notification text message service is expected to have various effects such as reducing concerns about personal information exposure due to loss of paper mail, saving manpower and costs required for producing and mailing paper documents, and protecting the environment by reducing paper documents.” He added, “We will continue to discover and improve various services to enhance citizens’ convenience in tax payment.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.