The government has floated a plan to use at least 100 trillion won in tax revenue expected from a semiconductor boom for future investment, but materials, parts and equipment are missing from the spending areas. That has revived criticism that semiconductor gains are not spreading to upstream industries.

A draft law on the establishment and operation of the Future Response Fund, announced by the Planning and Budget Office, completed a legislative notice period on Aug. 28. The addendum stipulates the law will take effect on the day it is promulgated. The bill contains no provisions for new tax items or tax rate increases, making it different in form from the windfall tax that has been discussed, but much of the money to be accumulated in the fund is expected to come from semiconductor performance.

The creation of the fund was foreshadowed at the National Fiscal Strategy Meeting in July. President Lee Jae-myung (이재명) said at the meeting, "An unprecedented amount of additional tax revenue is expected to occur thanks to a major semiconductor boom triggered by the AI revolution."

At the first Fiscal Management Strategy Consultative Council on Aug. 21, the Planning and Budget Office said it had prepared the fund to use additional semiconductor tax revenue as a strategic investment source to lift potential growth. Given that next year's national tax revenue may exceed 500 trillion won, far above the forecast of 412 trillion won, the fund is expected to amount to at least 100 trillion won, according to an analysis. On the fund's size, it said it could not disclose it because the scale of additional tax revenue can be announced only after an official national tax revenue forecast by the Ministry of Finance and Economy.

In other words, the design is to create a channel to send tax revenue earned by semiconductors outside the semiconductor sector. Whether it is appropriate to build reserves by bypassing the existing order for using surplus revenue, such as repaying national debt, remains a point of contention during the legislative process.

For now, there are no specific provisions that name a particular industry or company in raising the fund's resources. The bill sets the standard for the fund's resources as domestic tax revenue and includes 7 tax items: income tax, corporate tax, inheritance and gift tax, value-added tax, individual consumption tax excluding tobacco, stamp tax and securities transaction tax. Even without imposing more taxes on semiconductor companies, stronger semiconductor performance increases corporate tax, and the higher corporate tax lifts total domestic tax revenue, becoming a source of the fund.

According to the Ministry of Finance and Economy's "June 2026 National Tax Revenue Status", cumulative domestic tax revenue through June came to 196.7 trillion won, up 26.1 trillion won from a year earlier. By tax item, the increases were led by income tax at 10.4 trillion won, securities transaction tax at 5.2 trillion won, value-added tax at 4.9 trillion won and corporate tax at 4.3 trillion won, meaning corporate tax's contribution is not large at this stage.

The Ministry of Finance and Economy said semiconductor-related operating profit and performance bonuses have not yet been reflected in tax revenue and are expected to be reflected sequentially starting with corporate tax interim payments in August. Samsung Electronics' second-quarter operating profit was 8.95 trillion won and SK Hynix's was 6.05 trillion won, both record highs for a quarter. As corporate tax levied on those profits enters tax revenue in the second half, additional semiconductor tax revenue will take the largest share of the fund's income.

The additional tax revenue defined by the bill is a concept aimed at this phase. It is the amount obtained by subtracting a trend estimate of domestic tax revenue from the originally budgeted domestic tax revenue, and the trend estimate is calculated by applying the 12-year average annual growth rate for 2 years to the settled amount from 2 years earlier. Unlike excess tax revenue caused by one-year estimation errors, the formula filters out increases beyond long-term trends, such as a semiconductor boom.

The current National Fiscal Act stipulates that surplus revenue should be used in the following order: settlements for local allocation tax and local education finance grants, contributions to the Public Funds Repayment Fund, and repayment of national debt. If the fund is created, additional tax revenue will go into the fund without going through this order. An industry official said, "It is a design to use resources flexibly."

◆Looking into the 'Future Response Fund'... materials, parts and equipment are nowhere to be found

Moreover, the fund's utilisation plan is out of line with the current problem recognition. The initial background for creating the Future Response Fund was a diagnosis that the semiconductor boom does not spread well through the market. But the direction is off. The diagnosis highlighted the need to localise existing supply chains, but the resources are headed toward securing new technologies.

According to the National Assembly Budget Office, it analysed that out of the semiconductor industry's value-added inducement coefficient of 0.57, the indirect effect is 0.17, less than half that of automobiles at 0.39 and ships at 0.42. It pointed to materials, parts and equipment as the bottleneck. Import dependence for semiconductor manufacturing equipment and materials is 0.334, above the manufacturing average of 0.233, meaning a smaller share returns to domestic upstream industries. The group benefiting from performance bonuses is also limited to about 230,000 people working in IT industries with 300 or more employees, or 1.1 percent of the total.

The prescriptions presented by the National Assembly Budget Office were research and development support to raise localisation rates for materials, parts and equipment, stronger industry-academia cooperation, and shared growth between large and small companies through realistic supply prices. There is no provision that specifies materials, parts and equipment, cited as the cause of weak spillovers, in the uses of the Future Response Fund accounts. The fund's growth engine account, meanwhile, includes investment in 7 major technologies such as frontier-level AI development, physical AI, small modular reactors and aerospace, and the local account sets uses as expanding residents' living infrastructure and supporting rural and fishing communities.