After the National Tax Service exposed the password to a seized virtual asset (coin) wallet belonging to a delinquent taxpayer, leading to the theft of assets worth several billion won, it was found that about 80 million won in taxes had been spent over the past two years on virtual asset training.
According to the Public Procurement Service's Nara Market on the 12th, the National Tax Service carried out outsourced training on "virtual asset transaction and tax practice" in 2024 and 2025. The outsourced training budget was 42.28 million won in 2024 and 41.01 million won in 2025.
The purpose of the training was to enhance employees' response capabilities by gaining information on the overall understanding and trends of virtual assets and new tax issues. The National Tax Service said it would structure the training so that theory and case studies run in parallel and can be applied immediately to practice through virtual asset education.
The training ran seven hours a day, took place three times in total, and trained 300 people in 2024 and 270 people in 2025. After completing the training, it is said that teaching materials were produced and distributed.
Although the National Tax Service spent a budget of 83.29 million won on virtual asset training, it made a mistake at the end of last month by exposing the "mnemonic code" of the seized coin in a press release. A mnemonic code is core information equivalent to combining a bank account password, a digital certificate, and a one-time password (OTP; One Time Password) card.
The person who initially stole the virtual asset returned it to the original owner's e-wallet, but the wallet had already been made a target for hackers after the mnemonic code was disclosed, and it was stolen again a few hours later. A National Tax Service official said, "We did our best in cooperation with the Korean National Police Agency to recover the coin, but we could not prevent the hackers' second theft."
Park Sung-hun of the People Power Party said at a full meeting of the National Assembly's Planning and Finance Committee the previous day, "People are calling the National Tax Service 'digital fools.' This is a security incident on par with the government publishing a photo of a bank account password," adding, "Under these circumstances, saying you will seize virtual assets and collect taxes is absurd, and if you fail to recover them, won't this ultimately have to be borne by taxpayers' money?"
Lee Sung-jin, Vice Administrator of the National Tax Service, answered, "We had guidelines in place for handling compulsory collection of virtual assets, but we lacked detailed manuals. We acknowledge our lack of experience and understanding regarding virtual assets."