Why Korea’s Tax Agents Are Fighting the Wrong Enemy
Korea has two professional licenses for tax work: Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) and Licensed Tax Agents (세무사, roughly equivalent to “Enrolled Agents” in the US). Most people treat this dual structure as a given. But look more closely and a question emerges: why does the tax agent license exist? And is the profession fighting the right battle?
Where it started: a license carved out of CPA work
The Tax Agent Act was enacted in September 1961 by the military junta then governing Korea. The Ministry of Finance proposed it to the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction as a way to address a practical shortage of professionals who could help ordinary taxpayers with filings.
What’s notable about the origin: in the early version of the law, CPAs and lawyers were automatically granted tax agent licenses. The profession was designed from the start as a subset of what CPAs already did — a narrower license for a narrower scope of work.
The context was understandable. In the early 1960s, Korea had very few CPAs, and there wasn’t enough capacity to handle the volume of tax filings a modernizing economy would generate. The tax agent system was a practical solution to a real gap.
The problem is that this solution — created for 1960s Korea — has been running mostly unchanged for over six decades.
The core of the profession: tax representation
Strip away the credential and the politics, and what a tax agent actually does is straightforward: prepare and file tax returns on behalf of clients. That’s the heart of the profession. That’s its reason for existing.
And that’s exactly what technology is now doing at scale.
Hometax, Korea’s national tax filing portal, has steadily improved its self-service infrastructure for individual filers. Platforms like Samjumsam have turned freelancer income tax filing into a consumer product with millions of users. AI-powered accounting services are automating bookkeeping and return preparation for small businesses. The routine work of tax representation — the core of what tax agents do — is being absorbed by software.
If the existential threat to the tax agent profession is technological displacement, then that’s the battle that matters.
So who are they fighting instead?
CPAs.
Here’s where the narrative gets distorted. CPAs in Korea have always had the legal right to perform tax representation work. The recent amendments to the CPA Act don’t expand CPA authority into new territory — they clarify and affirm rights that already existed. CPAs hold a broader, more rigorous credential: the CPA exam covers tax law, accounting, financial management, economics, and business administration. The tax agent exam focuses primarily on tax law and accounting. By any reasonable measure, the CPA is the higher-order license; the tax agent license has always been a narrower subset.
The Tax Agent Association has framed this clarification as “occupational territory theft” — as if CPAs are invading ground that belongs to tax agents. But this framing inverts the actual hierarchy. It’s closer to arguing that a general practitioner is encroaching on a specialist’s territory by treating patients — when the specialist’s license was always the narrower one.
The current head of the Tax Agent Association, Koo Jae-yi, has gone further: announcing ambitions to expand the profession into government subsidy verification and public fund auditing — work that accounting firms have traditionally handled. The association isn’t just defending existing ground; it’s pushing to claim territory it never occupied, while simultaneously calling CPA clarification an act of aggression.
The energy and resources that could go toward adapting to technological change are instead going into manufacturing a territorial dispute with a fellow professional group.
Why?
Choosing the right enemy
Think about it politically and it makes sense.
AI and platforms are an enemy you can’t fight. You can’t legislate the direction of technology. Acknowledging that reality head-on means admitting that the leadership has no answer — that the profession’s core value is eroding and there’s no clear response. That threatens the organization itself.
CPAs, on the other hand, are a fightable enemy. You can lobby against them, pass laws, and claim victory. Members rally around a shared threat instead of questioning whether leadership has a plan. Internal frustration gets redirected outward.
This is textbook diversionary politics: when you face an internal crisis you can’t solve, manufacture or amplify an external conflict to extend your political life. It works at the national level — governments with declining approval ratings have a long history of picking external fights — and it works just as well inside professional associations.
The irony is real: in front of the technology threat, CPAs and tax agents are in the same boat. Both professions feel pressure from automation and platform services eating into routine work. They could be natural allies in figuring out what professional expertise means in a world where AI handles the mechanics. Instead, they’re burning energy fighting each other.
The missing stakeholder
There’s one party notably absent from this entire conflict: taxpayers.
From a taxpayer’s perspective, what matters is simple — can I access a qualified professional to help with my tax situation? Whether that professional holds a CPA license or a tax agent license is largely irrelevant.
While the two associations argue about jurisdictional lines, taxpayers navigate a confusing landscape, and the actual quality and accessibility of professional tax services doesn’t improve.
Professional licensing exists to protect consumers, not to protect the licensed. When that principle inverts — when the system becomes primarily about preserving incumbent interests — the licensing framework has become political rather than functional.
What this is actually about
This isn’t a criticism of individual tax agents. Most of them are working professionals doing their jobs conscientiously.
The issue is institutional direction. The energy of the tax agent association is concentrated on defensive politics rather than on reinventing what professional tax expertise looks like in an era of automation. And the target of that political energy has been chosen not because it addresses the real threat, but because it’s a battle that can be won.
Technology doesn’t wait for licensing disputes to resolve. Platforms will keep absorbing routine tax work regardless of how the Tax Agent Act is amended. The question for the profession isn’t how to hold the line against CPAs — it’s what a tax professional offers that software can’t.
That’s the question worth fighting over.
The author is a CPA and has worked in tax policy and tax-tech product development.