Critical revisions to Korea’s financial laws needed to promote Korea’s blockchain and cryptocurrency industries might be facing their last chance.

Korean-language blockchain news outlet BlockMedia reports that as Korea convenes an extraordinary parliament session for 30 days starting Monday, the blockchain industry is watching to see if the the assembly’s Legislation and Judiciary Committee will finally submit revisions to the Financial Transactions Reporting Act (FTRA) to a plenary session for a vote.

Those revisions, which call for cryptocurrency exchanges to register with the Financial Services Commission’s Financial Intelligence Unit, are seen as a first step in bringing blockchain and cryptocurrency into Korea’s institutional mainstream.

South Korea’s Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Science and ICT, Financial Services Commission and other government bodies have been urging lawmakers to get a move on and pass the revisions before June, when the FATF inspects whether members countries are implementing the task force’s anti-money laundering (AML) guidelines. The government also needs the revisions to be passed before crafting crypto tax policy, the National Tax Service’s preemptive efforts notwithstanding.

Last month, however, the Legislation and Judiciary Committee failed to pass the revisions so it could be voted on in a plenary session, with lawmakers arguing that other more pressing laws connected with livelihood issues should be dealt with first.

So the FTRA revisions got put on the back burner, along with countless other bills.

The good news is if the committee submits the revisions to a plenary vote, history shows that non-controversial bills pass with little problem. The key is getting the committee to submit the bill to a vote in the first place, something that requires ensuring lawmakers understand the urgency of the matter.

A legal expert told Block Media that the Financial Services Committee hasn’t been pushing the revisions as hard as it pushed revisions to the so-called Three Data-Related Laws the government regarded as key to developing Korea’s big data industry.

The bigger concern is that if a plenary session fails to pass the FTRA revisions this time around, it’s unlikely to pass them at all. This is because lawmakers will be focused on the general legislative election set for April. A blockchain industry official told the Block Post that with the election just around the corner, it didn’t seem likely there’d be another chance to pass the revisions.

That said, the Block Post notes that the parliament sometimes passes unpassed legislation right before a session ends, so there’s still a chance even if it doesn’t vote on the bill during this extraordinary session.

 

Also in the Korean cryptospace…

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