Then How Do You Hire in Korea? Own the Employer.

A foreign company can employ someone in Korea lawfully, without an EOR and without a local operation, by owning the company that employs them. That is the whole of the answer, and for a single hire it is a smaller undertaking than it sounds.

The arrangement is this. A Korean company you own outright employs the person. That company holds a services agreement with your head office and invoices it each month for the work performed. The employer and the company the work is contracted to are the same company — which is what an EOR cannot be, and why the limits set out in the earlier article do not reach this arrangement.

Everything else follows from ownership. You hold all of the shares, so you appoint and remove the director, you decide who is hired and on what terms, and you decide when the employment ends. There is no list of permitted roles to fit the job into, and no two-year ceiling to plan around. The role can be country management, business development, sales, operations — whatever the person is actually there to do, for as long as you need them.

The reason companies put this off is rarely the paperwork. It is the assumption that someone has to go to Korea and be present there — to incorporate, to sit in front of a bank officer, to be the person the authorities can reach. The director of your Korean company is a Korean resident we provide, and that is what removes the travel. Incorporation, tax registration, the corporate bank account, the foreign-exchange filing on your shareholding and everything that follows are handled here, on documents. Nobody from your side comes to Korea for the setup, for the bank account, or afterwards.

There is also no incorporation for you to run. The entity setup that a first hire in Korea normally begins with — forming the company, registering it for tax, opening its account, making the foreign-exchange filing — is not a project you commission, staff and wait on. We do all of it here, on documents, and what you receive is a company that has never done anything else: formed for this arrangement and no other, with no prior trading, no debts and no arrears to inherit. Its entire record begins with you.

What sets the schedule is not our end of it but yours — the documents we need from you, which have to be apostilled or consularised before they are usable here: your certificate of incorporation, a board resolution approving the shareholding and the appointment of the director, a passport copy of the signing officer, and a certified specimen signature or seal. We send the templates the day you ask, because in practice the apostille is the long pole and the Korean steps run behind it. One further item sets the start date rather than the setup: if the employee is a foreign national, their right to work has to be in place before their first day — an existing visa with the right status costs no time, a new sponsorship does. Tell us the role and the person's status and we will tell you what your target date depends on before you commit to it.

The company's bank account is signed by the Korean resident director, and by that director alone. Payments run on an agreed schedule and to a closed list of purposes — salary, the social insurance agencies, the director's remuneration, our fee, and tax. A single signature over a restricted list of uses is what stops money placed in the company from leaving it for anything else. You are not asked to take that on trust: every movement on the account appears in the monthly report, itemised. And because you hold all the shares, the director serves at your decision — you may replace that person at any time, and the signing authority moves with the office, not with the individual.

This is the point where the comparison with an EOR is usually stated backwards. With an EOR, the account the salary leaves from is the provider's own, in the provider's name, and what reaches you is an invoice. Here the account belongs to your company, the balance is your company's cash, and the report shows you what happened to it. Restricted signing authority is a control on the money, not a limit on your control of the company.

Operationally the month should feel no different from an EOR. We calculate what the company needs — salary, employer-side social insurance contributions, the retirement contribution, the director's remuneration, our fee and tax — and tell you the figure. You remit once. The company converts it and pays each recipient on schedule. You are not asked to work out the won conversion, employer contribution rates or retirement funding yourself; that calculation is part of the service, exactly as it is with an EOR.

What the monthly service covers: payroll and payslips; enrolment and monthly filings for the four mandatory social insurances; withholding tax and the annual year-end settlement; the corporate tax and VAT returns; the employment contract in Korean and English; statutory leave tracking; retirement funding paid into a defined-contribution account every month from the first month, so nothing accrues as an unfunded obligation; and the monthly report showing payroll, filings made and every movement on the account. Five things in that list sit outside an EOR quotation entirely, because an EOR does not give you them: the company, the resident director, the tax registration, the corporate bank account, and the foreign-exchange filing on your shareholding.

There is one respect in which an EOR asks less of you, and it should be said plainly rather than buried. If your Korean company owed national tax beyond what its own assets cover, you as sole shareholder would be liable for the shortfall. A company held through an EOR does not exist, so no such liability exists either. That is the trade, and it is the one line in the comparison below that runs in the EOR's favour.

Two things narrow it. The company is newly formed for this arrangement, so there is no earlier tax position for you to inherit — the liability can only ever attach to what happens from your first month onward. And from that month the company's tax obligations are narrow and known — payroll withholding, VAT, and one corporate return a year — and we prepare and file all of them. The liability attaches to unpaid tax, so the safeguard is that the filings and the payments are ours to run, and that both are reported to you monthly.

Set the rest of the comparison out and it runs the other way at every point. Who employs the person: the provider, or a company you own. Who signs the account the salary leaves from: the provider, in its own name, or a director you appoint and can replace. Who can end the employment: the provider, at your request, or your own company, at your decision. Where the deposit sits: with the provider, or inside your own company alongside its capital. What you can see: an invoice, or every movement on the account. What happens if the provider fails: with an EOR you are an unsecured creditor for the deposit and the employment itself has to be rebuilt elsewhere, whereas here the company, its account and its cash stay yours and what has to be replaced is an administrator. How long the arrangement can run: two years at most, or no limit. Every one of those is a question about who holds what — and on every one of them except the tax liability above, the answer is that you do.

The question that usually decides it is the last one: what if you want out. Your agreement with us carries a standing option, from day one, to sell the shares to us at what you put in, at any time and for any reason. You do not run a dissolution, and you are not left holding a Korean company you cannot exit. There is no minimum term either — the service ends on thirty days' notice from either side — and if you would rather keep the company at that point, you appoint your own director and accountant and we hand over the books, the seal and the account. We quote on the role and the headcount. Send us the role, the monthly gross salary and the intended start date, together with the employee's nationality and visa status if they are not Korean, and we will come back with a firm quotation and the draft agreements.