South Korea's National Tax Service is preparing a plan to notify detailed standards for taxing digital assets next month.

National Tax Service Commissioner Kwang-hyun Lim (임광현) said at a parliamentary audit of the National Assembly's Planning and Finance Committee on Tuesday that preparations were in place to do it around November, after People Power Party lawmaker Lee Ja (임이자) asked about the timing of a notice related to digital asset taxation.

Lee said tax standards by transaction type, including staking, airdrops, hard forks and DeFi, were not yet clear, and pointed to insufficient preparations.

Lim said transactions should be assessed based on economic substance rather than the name of an individual transaction. "What matters is the economic relationship rather than transaction types or names," he said. "It is a question of whether it is a transfer or a loan."

On airdrops and hard forks, he said they should be considered taxable if they have the nature of a transfer or a loan. He added that additional consultations with the Ministry of Economy and Finance were needed on tax standards for some transaction types, including staking.

Planning and Finance Committee Chairman Seung-rae Cho (조승래) said the government should prepare on the premise that the current system would be implemented unless parliament separately decides to defer taxation. He asked the government to report at the comprehensive audit on the notice plan discussed with the Ministry of Economy and Finance.

Lim said the tax authority was preparing to execute digital asset taxation without disruption. He said the ministry and the National Tax Service would jointly oversee preparations, while the National Tax Service was responsible for building systems and practical preparations.

He did not present specific figures for the number of taxpayers and expected tax revenue. Lim said that after the law takes effect, relevant data should be secured and verification should proceed starting with filings made from May 2028.

Building taxation systems at exchanges was also cited as a task. After criticism that preparations were insufficient at five domestic won-based exchanges, including Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, DigitalX and Gopax, Lim said, "We are continuously consulting with exchanges at the working level."

Lim also acknowledged that there were still limits to securing tax data for transactions using overseas exchanges or personal wallets.

On the automatic exchange of digital asset transaction information between countries under the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework, Lim said, "If it is implemented, more advanced data exchange will take place." He added that other countries implementing digital asset taxation face the same difficulties in areas that are hard to capture, such as wallet transactions between individuals.