초록 열기/닫기 버튼
신탁재산으로부터 발생하는 수익(收益)을 받을 권리만을 자연인인 제3자에게 주고 ‘원본(元本)’에 대한 권리는 여전히 위탁자가 보유하는 경우의 과세 문제는 단순하지 않다. 신탁이 설정되어 수익자(受益者)가 수익을 받을 법적 지위를 취득하였을 때 증여세 과세가 필요한데, 그 가치를 평가하는 일이 쉽지 않기 때문에 현재 우리나라에서는 실제 수익이 발생하여 지급되는 시점에 증여세 과세를 하는 것이 보통이다. 하지만 이 역시 같은 소득에 소득세가 부과되는 경우에는 증여세를 부과하지 않는다는 「상속세 및 증여세법」의 조항 때문에 실제로 문제 될 여지는 작다. 즉 이러한 경우 대개 소득이 발생하는 시점에 수익자에게 바로 귀속시켜 소득세를 물리는 것으로 그만이다. 하지만 비슷한 목적에서 이용될 수 있는 다른 법 형식의 경우와 비교하여 본다면 이러한 과세는 지나치게 가벼워 정당화되기 어렵다. 이 글은 소득의 기본 개념과 조세중립성의 측면에서 이러한 문제를 지적하고, 몇 가지 가능성을 대안 삼아 검토하는 가운데 여러 모로 보아 가장 바람직한 것으로서 해당 수익을 수탁자에게 1차 과세하고(신탁실체설) 2차적으로 수익자가 그러한 수익을 지급 받았을 때 한 번 더 과세하는 방안을 제시한다.
This article discusses how to tax income arising from a “plain vanilla” type of trust arrangement, where a property owner puts his / her property in a trust so that the trustee pays a third party beneficiary, a natural person, the annual income arising from the property. This is a matter much more complicated than it first seems, especially in Korea where exemption level for gift tax is low. The ideal solution seems to dictate that gift tax should be levied on the beneficiary at the time of the initial transfer of property to the trustee, when the trustee attains the legal title thereto. However, the evaluation of the beneficiary’s rights to the annual income arising from the said property, discounted at present value, is not always feasible. The practice in Korea, indeed, is to merely levy income tax on the beneficiary on each receipt of the annual income, and gift tax is usually foregone due to the provision in the Inheritance and Gift Tax Act that blocks double taxation of income and gift taxes on the same increase in net wealth. This article argues that this practice, albeit simple, lacks in justification in the sense that its overall tax burden is too low, compared with other types of transaction that could be used for similar purposes, thus infringing tax neutrality. The said practice is also problematic in that the relevant income is taxed in the hands of someone who are not viewed as the owner of the property for tax purposes. Considering certain features peculiar to Korean income tax law, this article suggests instead that the annual income should be first taxed in the hands of the trustee, and then the beneficiary be taxed on receipt of the said income from the trustee. Although difficult to fully defend as a matter of income tax theory, this alternative is easy to administer and reasonably expected to bear a result similar to that under the apparently ideal way of taxation (i.e., a combination of gift tax and income tax), as long as the payment of the trustee to the beneficiary is not deductible from the trustee’s taxable income. Since this article deals with only the most basic, “plain vanilla”-type of trust arrangement, the analyses of this article should be further tested and developed against diverse and more complex types of trust that exist in the real world. The author believes, however, that fundamental principles of income taxation such as tax neutrality and the rules governing “tax ownership” or attribution of income should always serve as guiding principles even though trust is a relatively new and somewhat incongruous phenomenon in Korean legal system.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
trust, income tax, gift tax, trust conduit theory, trust entity theory, tax neutrality
