During the anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle President Kim Il Sung put forward a revolutionary and popular principle of taxation in "The Ten-point Programme of the Association for the Restoration of the Fatherland" and wisely led the effort to introduce it in the guerrilla bases.

After the liberation of the country, he replaced the depredatory tax system applied by the Japanese imperialists with a popular and democratic one and took measures to systematically reduce taxes along with the foundations of the self-supporting national economy being built up in the country.

In Juche 44 (1955) the Republic lowered the blue and white collar workers' income tax 30 percent and radically reduced taxes of handicraftsmen, businessmen and merchants. It also brought down the peasants' tax in kind at 20.1 percent on an average from 25 percent of the yield, and again at 8.4 percent since 1959.

With the production relationship transformed on socialist lines and solid foundations of socialist industrialization laid, it pushed ahead with preparations for the abolition of the tax system and eliminated agricultural tax in kind in 1966.

Thus only the income tax paid by the industrial and non-industrial workers and some amount of local taxes still remained in the DPRK.

The President had a historic law, "On Abolishing the Tax System," adopted at the third session of the 5th Supreme People's Assembly of the DPRK convened in March 1974 to finally do away with the tax system in the country.