Woojeong Kim
International & Korea Tax Specialist
About Bluestones BPO
A Seoul accounting, payroll and operations team for foreign companies in Korea. Integrity is the operating constraint, not the tagline.
Last updated 13 August 2026
Who we are
Bluestones BPO is an accounting, payroll and business-process outsourcing firm in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. We work for foreign-invested companies operating in South Korea — subsidiaries, branches and liaison offices of overseas parents.
We were established in 2020 and we do one thing: we run the finance and compliance function of a Korean entity on behalf of the people who own it from somewhere else.
The problem we exist for
Foreign companies rarely fail in Korea because the market defeated them. They fail on administration.
A filing is missed because nobody knew it existed. A payroll is wrong because a foreign template contract conflicts with the Labor Standards Act. Head office receives a Korean-language balance sheet for two years and never asks what is in it, because asking would reveal that nobody understands it. An office of four people has one person who controls the bank account, the invoices and the reporting, and everyone assumes that is fine until it is not.
None of these are interesting problems. All of them are expensive.
How we work
One team, not four vendors. Bookkeeping, payroll, VAT and the corporate return are done by the same people. The most common structural failure we are asked to fix is a bookkeeper and a tax agent who each assumed the other was handling something.
Two audiences, one ledger. The National Tax Service gets statutory books in Korean. Your head office gets a management pack in its own chart of accounts, currency and language. Both are derived from the same records, so they cannot drift apart.
Controls, provided from outside. A three-person office cannot create segregation of duties internally. We supply it — as bank signatory, as the party that reconciles the accounts, as the authorisation that sits between a local invoice and a payment leaving.
Plain answers, including inconvenient ones. If your liaison office has started selling and now has a permanent establishment problem, we would rather tell you in month one than write it up in a year-end memo.
Integrity is a constraint, not a value statement
Every professional services firm claims integrity. Ours is testable, because it costs us things:
- We tell prospective clients when they do not need us yet, and when they have outgrown us.
- We decline payments that are not supported by documentation, including when the person asking is the client’s own country manager.
- We hand over cleanly. Your books, your files, your access. Outsourcing that is difficult to exit is not a service, it is a lock-in.
- We publish what we know, with the source and the date attached, on our blog — and we correct it when it changes.
Our professionals
Brian H. Morikuni
General Manager
Jaeeun Kim
Korea Business Setup Specialist
Steve S. Shin
Business Modeling Specialist
Who we are not for
We would rather be clear about this than waste your time on a call.
- Companies with no Korean entity and no intention of forming one. You need an employer-of-record or a distributor, not an outsourced finance function.
- Companies looking for the cheapest possible bookkeeper. There are firms that will file something for very little money. If price is the only variable, we will not win and should not.
- Purely domestic Korean businesses. Our whole model is built around cross-border reporting and remote oversight. If you do not have a foreign parent, you are paying for capability you will not use.
Where we are
Our office is in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. We work Korean business hours, KST, and we answer enquiries within one business day — see contact.
Guidance published on this site is general information about Korean accounting, payroll and tax practice. It is not advice on your specific facts, and it is not a substitute for an engagement. See our disclaimer and our editorial and sourcing policy.
Frequently asked questions
How large a company do you work with?
Most of our clients have between two and eighty people in Korea. Below that, a company often needs a company-formation service and a bookkeeper rather than a full outsourced finance function, and we will say so. Above it, the question becomes whether an in-house Korean finance team is the better answer — and sometimes it is, in which case we would rather help you build it and hand over than keep an engagement that no longer suits you.
Do you work with Korean-owned companies?
Our work is built around the specific problem of a Korean entity owned and overseen from abroad — dual-language reporting, head-office consolidation, remote control over payments, and the gap between Korean statutory practice and what a foreign parent expects to see. A purely domestic Korean company generally does not have that problem and is usually better served by a domestic firm.
Are you an accounting firm or an outsourcing provider?
Both, and the combination is the point. A Korean Certified Public Accountant is involved in every engagement, which is what allows tax positions and statutory accounts to be signed off properly. The outsourcing side is the day-to-day processing that keeps those filings from becoming a year-end scramble. Firms that do only one of the two hand you a gap between them.
What languages do you work in?
Korean and English. Korean for statutory filings, correspondence with the tax office and the insurance authorities, and everything that has to be submitted locally. English for reporting, meetings and correspondence with your head office. That dual-language capability is not a nicety — it is the reason a foreign parent can actually understand what its Korean entity is doing.