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Foreign companies do not fail in Korea because the market is hard. They fail because a filing was missed, a payroll was wrong, or nobody told head office what the numbers meant. We handle that part.
Statutory books kept in Korean for the tax office, and a management pack in your group's format and language for the people who make decisions. One team does both, so the two never disagree.
Monthly payroll, the four major insurances, withholding and year-end settlement — calculated in Korea, reported in English, and reconciled into your accounts rather than sitting in a separate system.
The Korean filing calendar, handled end to end: VAT returns, the corporate income tax return, withholding on payments to your parent, and the transfer pricing file that supports them.
Subsidiary, branch or liaison office — the choice determines your tax position, your ability to hire, and how hard it is to send money home. We help you choose deliberately, then build it.
Bank signatory, cash administration, reconciliation and vendor control — the segregation of duties a three-person Korean office cannot build on its own, provided from outside it.
Bookkeeping, payroll, VAT and the corporate return are done by the same people, so nothing falls between a bookkeeper and a tax agent.
Statutory books in Korean for the tax office; a management pack in your group's format and language for the people who actually make decisions.
Acting as bank signatory and reconciling the accounts gives you segregation of duties that a two-person local office cannot create on its own.
Your books, your files, your access. If you outgrow us and hire in-house, we hand over cleanly — that is the point of outsourcing, not a hostage situation.
The Korean liaison office status report has been mandatory since 2022 and more than half of the offices required to file it never have. From this year there is a fine attached, and the first exposed filing falls due on 10 February 2027.
A December year-end Korean subsidiary files something in ten months out of twelve. Here is the whole calendar in one place, including the one annual filing that no longer exists and the one that becomes monthly in 2027.
Four of Korea's 2026 public holidays land on a Saturday. Two of them buy a Monday back and two vanish, and the difference is written into a presidential decree that most foreign-owned payrolls have never read.
Three changes to Korean parental leave take effect on 18 September 2026, and a fourth already did on 20 August. Each one moves a date your payroll calendar depends on, and one of them creates a leave entitlement that did not exist before.
Korean corporate tax tests client entertainment twice: first on how it was paid, then on how much of it there was. A foreign-owned subsidiary usually fails the first test on receipts and the second on a ceiling it assumed was three times higher.
Korea is not raising the numbers in the wage-arrears penalty. It is moving the offence into a heavier article of the Labor Standards Act, and the list of provisions that travel with it includes the overtime premium.
Not directly. Running a Korean payroll requires a registered Korean employer, which means either establishing an entity — usually a subsidiary — or using an employer-of-record arrangement in which a third party is the legal employer. The two are not equivalent: an employer-of-record limits your control over the employee and does not remove permanent establishment risk if the work being done in Korea is your core business. Which is right depends on how long you expect to be here and what the people will actually do.
A subsidiary is a separate Korean company that can trade, invoice and hire freely, and it is the only one of the three eligible for foreign-invested company status. A branch is an extension of the foreign parent, taxed in Korea on Korean-source income, with liability sitting with the parent. A liaison office cannot conduct profit-making activity at all and may not issue invoices — it is for market research and liaison only. Most operating businesses need a subsidiary. See our company registration guide for the full comparison.
Korea’s VAT year is divided into two taxable periods, each carrying a preliminary and a final return, so a corporation files four times a year at the standard 10% rate. The corporate income tax return is due within three months of the fiscal year end, with an interim return during the year. Payroll withholding is filed monthly, and there is an annual year-end settlement for every employee in February.
It scales with transaction volume, headcount and how much reporting your head office needs, so any figure quoted before those are known is a guess. What we can tell you quickly is what a compliant month looks like for an entity your size, which is usually the more useful number. Send us your last trial balance or VAT return and we will be specific in the first reply — no discovery call required.
Routine bookkeeping does not legally require a Korean Certified Public Accountant. Tax filings, statutory financial statements, and any position the National Tax Service might challenge are a different matter. Companies that split the work — a low-cost bookkeeper plus an occasional tax agent — tend to find the gap during an audit, when neither party owns the answer. A KICPA is involved in every engagement here for exactly that reason.
Usually within one filing cycle. We take the trial balance, supporting ledgers, fixed asset register, payroll registers and filing history, reconcile the opening position, and flag anything that does not tie. That reconciliation is the valuable part — it is often the first independent check anyone has run on the previous provider’s closing balances. Expect the first month to involve more questions than a steady-state month.
