A lawmaker on Monday alleged that HomeTax, the government’s online tax payment system, is exposed to the threat of hacking and lacks adequate security.

Currently, about 5.22 million Korean taxpayers, most of them business owners, are using the system due to benefits such as tax cuts.

According to Rep. Lee Yong-sup of Democratic Party, most people run private tax management programs on their computer to use HomeTax.

In the process of uploading the data to the online system, Lee said, a folder is created automatically within the hard disk drive to save the personal information.

The problem is that the folder can be opened and read without any special program even though it contains highly sensitive information such as registration number, cellphone number and income, he said.

He recently confirmed the fact after testing the system together with officials of National Tax Service.

“The agency has had no idea about it thus far,” Lee said, calling for follow-up measures to better protect private information of online taxpayers.

“In order to prevent potential hacking, the tax agency needs to advise individual tax management system operators to encode the data file within users’ computers,” he said.

By Lee Ji-yoon (jylee@heraldcorp.com)