Public Institution Quasi-Taxes Can Also Be Paid by Card and Mobile

Small and Medium Business Ombudsman, 464 Regulatory Improvements with 95 Public Institutions in the Second Half of This Year

Jubong Park, Small and Medium Business Ombudsman. / Photo by Dongju Yoon doso7@

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Jong-hwa] Most public institutions now allow payment of various quasi-taxes such as fees by card or mobile, and private companies can also utilize open tourism big data.

The Small and Medium Business Ombudsman (vice ministerial level) announced these details on the 30th at the '51st Emergency Economic Central Countermeasures Headquarters Meeting' as part of the '4th Public Institution On-site Sympathy SME Regulatory Improvement Plan.'

Public institution regulatory innovation began with the 1st plan in 2019, during which 370 unreasonable regulatory difficulties were addressed over three rounds. This measure collected regulatory difficulties repeatedly raised on-site, centered on 127 Corporate Growth Response Centers in the second half of this year, and strategically selected regulatory vulnerability points of SMEs to jointly discover regulatory difficulties in a top-down manner.

Through this, it created regulatory improvement results of 464 cases (125.2% increase compared to the 3rd plan), greatly exceeding the number of previously accumulated improvement tasks, including the comprehensive adjustment of about 100 quasi-tax regulations that caused a significant burden as fixed costs in business activities.

First, the payment methods for quasi-taxes at public institutions were diversified. From the second half of this year, 23 public institutions including the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency, which previously only allowed cash and account transfers for quasi-tax payments such as various fees, will be able to use various payment methods such as card and mobile payments. Before the improvement, only about 20% of quasi-tax payments at all public institutions could be made by card.

Tourism data held by public institutions has been opened for use by private companies. The Korea Tourism Organization is expanding the production and collection of tourism big data for private opening, such as for tourism venture companies, supporting private company startups. Tourism big data will continue to expand as differentiated open data from private services, including the number of visitors by region, popular searches, congestion levels by tourist spots, average tourism duration, and multilingual tourism information.

Support is also provided for the commercialization verification of new technology communication services and products. The National IT Industry Promotion Agency has improved the process so that new products based on 5G and IoT can be commercialized and launched with only one verification by a public institution without separate technical verification procedures for each telecom company. This is expected to shorten the development period by an average of 1.6 months and reduce the average verification cost by 81 million KRW per company.

Additionally, the development and introduction of a non-face-to-face smart quality inspection system for power generation equipment reduced inspection costs and improved convenience, excessive management regulations for flower auction house tenants were improved, and application documents for petroleum alternative fuel quality inspection were simplified to reduce business costs and enhance convenience.

Park Ju-bong, Small and Medium Business Ombudsman, said, "Numerous public institutions are truly making great efforts on-site for SMEs," and added, "The SME Ombudsman will continue to take the lead in resolving regulatory difficulties on-site through collaboration with various government ministries and public institutions."

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