Korea names the screen: 42% of high-end corporate homes flagged as owner-family housing

The 42 percent came out of a subtraction, not an investigation. The National Tax Service began with 2,639 corporate homes above the comprehensive real estate tax thresholds ^[1], removed 1,157 units held by rental companies for leasing and 385 used for business purposes such as staff dormitories ^[3], and the 1,097 it describes as privately used by controlling shareholders' families is precisely what was left ^[16]. For anyone preparing a response, that is the whole mechanism. The agency does not have to show that an owner's child sleeps in the flat; it has to find that the company never placed the unit in a recognised category.

Priced out, the flagged pool is heavy. At an average assessed value above 2 billion won ^[4], the 1,097 units carry at least 2.19 trillion won of assessed value between them ^[17], and 453 of them, about 41 percent of the flagged group, are assessed above 3 billion won each ^[5][18].

No new legislation is involved. The benefit and the maintenance costs of housing occupied by shareholding executives and their relatives are already taxable, and Commissioner Lim Kwang-hyun's statement concedes that irregular free occupancy has continued as a practice in parts of the industry ^[10]. What changed is that the practice now has a published detection rule and a headcount.

Lim also says family use of a corporate home does not by itself amount to evasion ^[9], while calling it an important signal of a company's overall evasion risk ^[8]. The apartment is the doorway rather than the charge, and the arithmetic of that is unkind: imputed rent on one unit is small against what a full compliance review turns up at a group with revenue in the tens of trillions of won, which is the upper end of the range the flagged companies span ^[13].

The thinnest documentation sits behind the welfare label. In one case a company held a condominium worth more than 10 billion won as employee welfare while only the owner's family and a few executives actually used it ^[14], and elsewhere Gangnam and Yongsan units were presented externally as staff housing although employees knew whose family lived there ^[15]. Testimony of that kind already exists inside the company. So does the paper trail on the other structure the review names: homes transferred out of individual ownership into corporations to sidestep multiple-home rules, with the occupants unchanged ^[11]. Those units now carry two positions to defend, the one the transfer was built to improve and the owner-benefit one it created.