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Political talks about collecting income tax from pastors, priests and monks are all but dead as lawmakers continue to fear upsetting Korea's powerful church groups.
"There has yet to be a sufficient level of agreement that the country should start taxing the clergy,'' Kang Seog-hoon, a lawmaker from President Park Geun-hye's Saenuri Party and member of the National Assembly's strategy and finance committee, told reporters.
"It's questionable whether this is the right time to pursue such changes."
A lawmaker from the opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy, who did not want to be named, said it was unlikely that the talks would be revived at the National Assembly anytime soon.
"This is not an issue that can be strongly discussed at the National Assembly as politicians can only be sensitive to religious people," he said. "If this is something that needs to get done, the government will have to do it.''
Taxing ordained people has been under discussion since the previous Lee Myung-bak government as policymakers search for more tax sources to compensate for declining household incomes and a worsening job market.
The debate going nowhere was merely the inevitable becoming reality: lawmakers from the conservative governing party and opposition both fear for church groups such as the Christian Council of Korea (CCK) and the influence they could have on voters.
Korean Protestant churches, which the CCK represents, are frequently run like family businesses owned by pastors or senior church members. Many of these people strongly oppose paying income tax _ and they fear the being subject to tax investigations even more.
There has never been any law exempting the clergy from income tax. But churches and Buddhist temples have remained tax free for decades for reasons explained as "convention" and "cultural understanding."
Critics claim the case for religious organizations to pay tax could not be any more clear-cut. Korea is obviously a secular state and there is no reason people generating income from religious offerings should be above paying tax, a duty that every law-abiding citizen should share.
Protestant and Buddhist leaders in the past have rejected the idea of paying income tax, saying they deserve their tax-free status because their lives are dedicated to the "selfless serving of others.''
But there is an irony in that people who are supposedly committed to making society better have so much trouble accepting the basic individual burden essential for supporting it.
Besides, it is awkward for Protestants and Buddhists to play the selfless card when the Catholic Church has been voluntarily paying income tax since 1994.
