National Tax Service AI Consultation — South Korea's Voice-AI Line Lifts Tax Call Success From 24% to 98%

South Korea's national tax hotline, '126', was notoriously hard to get through to during peak filing periods: the previous year, only 24% of calls were successfully connected to a working consultation, leaving most taxpayers stuck on hold or unable to get through at all.

In May 2024, during the comprehensive income tax filing season, the National Tax Service (NTS) became the first Korean government agency to deploy an AI voice-recognition consultant on a public hotline. Trained on more than two million past consultation records plus tax law, regulations and case precedents, the system answers routine queries, sends relevant guidance and links, and directs callers to the right section of their return, operating around the clock including nights and holidays. It can field up to 1,250 concurrent calls.

NTS reported that the call-success rate rose from 24% the previous year to 98% in 2024, with total consultations climbing to roughly 840,000 — 2.7 times the prior year's volume. The agency framed the capacity gain as equivalent to hiring around 1,000 additional counsellors, at an estimated system cost of about KRW 400 million versus a projected KRW 8 billion to hire that many staff — roughly 5% of the cost. These figures, first published by NTS itself, were reported consistently across multiple independent Korean outlets covering the tax and public-policy beat.

The evidence has real limits: the headline numbers originate from the agency's own announcement rather than an independent audit, and no public data has been found on misdirection rates, complaint volumes, or how the AI handles complex or contested cases that still require a human specialist. NTS has since said it plans to extend similar AI consultation to other domains, but as of this write-up no other country's tax authority has replicated this specific system.

Read the full analysis: https://www.psnews.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=2055808