[Hot Policy] "AI Provides Tax Consultation"... Simultaneous Phone Support for 1,250 People

"This is the National Tax Consultation Center. All consultants are currently on calls. To provide prompt assistance, we will connect you to an artificial intelligence (AI) consultant."

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Last month, during the comprehensive income tax filing and payment period, when calling the National Tax Consultation Center and attempting to connect to a consultant, this automated phone response system (ARS) message was heard. This AI consultation service was the first of its kind operated by a government agency in the National Tax Service.

Choi Young-ho, head of the National Tax Service Big Data Center, explained, "Every May, the National Tax Consultation Center phones light up with about 2.12 million calls in May last year alone, but there are only 250 consultants, so only one out of four callers could get through. Taxpayers had significant complaints because they had to call multiple times and wait for long periods to receive consultation. To resolve these issues, we introduced an AI-based consultation service."

Choi Young-ho, head of the National Tax Service Big Data Center, is explaining the background of promoting AI consultation.

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The results have exceeded expectations. According to the National Tax Service on the 7th, the call success rate for comprehensive income tax consultations in May this year, after introducing the AI consultation service, reached 98%. Last May, it was only 26%. The significant increase in call success rate is because the AI consultant can handle 1,000 callers simultaneously. Hiring 1,000 additional human consultants would require at least 8 billion KRW, but through AI technology, the budget was drastically reduced to about 400 million KRW, approximately 5% of that amount.

Out of 1.41 million total consultations, AI handled 74%. Since there is no longer a need to call multiple times for consultation as in the past, the number of calls to the National Tax Consultation Center for comprehensive income tax inquiries decreased by 670,000 calls (32%) to 1.45 million calls compared to 2.12 million calls in May last year.

At the beginning of last year, the National Tax Service was preparing an AI consultation service using generative AI through the Ministry of Science and ICT's 'AI Normalization Strategy' pilot project. It was a long-term project aimed for implementation about three years later, but following the order from Commissioner Kim Chang-ki of the National Tax Service to "introduce a faster and more accurate AI consultation service," a scenario-based AI consultation service was promoted from early this year.

The AI consultation, piloted since last month, uses a scenario-based conversational AI method. This was chosen because more accurate consultation was deemed important. Kim Jae-seok, head of the Big Data Center Technical Support Team, explained, "Generative AI can provide broad and flexible answers but has the drawback of being difficult to immediately trace the cause of incorrect answers. Scenario-based conversational AI is trained on refined Q&A format data, resulting in higher accuracy, so we prioritized applying the conversational AI method."

Yoon So-young, Head of the Big Data General Team at the National Tax Service (left), and Kim Jae-seok, Head of the Technical Support Team, who prepared the AI consultation service.

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The Big Data Center conducted a comprehensive survey of past consultation cases to extract necessary questions for AI consultation. Team leader Kim said, "Based on this, we grouped similar questions such as how to file comprehensive income tax, how to report income, and selected 3,000 key questions, linking appropriate answers to each. For questions the AI could not answer, professional consultants, Big Data Center staff, and the Hometax advisory group manually connected questions and answers through a retraining process to improve accuracy." Furthermore, the National Tax Service monitored the AI consultation service in real time to identify incorrect answers.

The National Tax Service is considering expanding AI consultation not only to the National Tax Consultation Center but also to headquarters, tax offices, and other tax types such as value-added tax. Yoon So-young, head of the Big Data General Team, said, "If AI consultation is introduced to frontline tax offices, consultation rates will increase, and staff can focus on more complex tasks. We are considering expanding AI consultation from comprehensive income tax to value-added tax, year-end tax adjustments, and providing AI consultation for taxpayers who call tax offices or headquarters directly."

The National Tax Service expects AI consultation to greatly enhance taxpayer convenience. Center head Choi said, "Digitalization has been achieved in most areas of national tax administration, such as filing guidance, mobile electronic filing, and electronic payment, but telephone consultation was a blind spot. Starting with AI consultation, the National Tax Service will invest 30 billion KRW over two years from this year to advance the Hometax system and innovate accessibility and convenience of taxpayer services."

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