South Korea's public organizations were ordered to pay about 230 billion won (US$226 million) in additional taxes last year as a result of tax audits, government data showed Tuesday.

According to the data provided by the National Tax Service (NTS), public firms and other state-run institutes which received tax audits last year were ordered to pay 230.4 billion won in additional taxes.

The amount is much larger than the 59.6 billion won from a year earlier. It also marked the largest amount since 2007, when the audit-related tax surged to 413.8 billion won.

The hike is attributable in part to the increase in the number of companies subject to tax audits last year. The NTS conducted tax audits into 21 public organizations, up from 15 a year before, the data showed.

The average amount of additional taxes that a company had to pay also nearly tripled to 10.9 billion won last year from the previous year's 3.9 billion won.

From 2004 to 2013, the NTS levied 180 public firms with a combined 1.3 trillion won through tax audits. The agency did not disclose details on the tax audits into individual public organizations.

In his confirmation hearing on Monday, Lim Hwan-soo, the nominee for the new tax agency chief, said that the NTS will not use tax audits as a means to collect more tax but vowed to toughen its crackdown on tax evasion attempts, especially by large companies and wealthy people. (Yonhap)