What Lingers After the Numbers: A Conversation with Im Seok-in, Certified Tax Accountant (CTA)
"The first page is always a death certificate." — A conversation with Im Seok-in (임석인)
He does not talk like the sort of professional you imagine hunched over a calculator, pounding out certainty. He talks like someone trained to sit with uncertainty — the kind that arrives not as a question on a form, but as a family's silence after the word inheritance is spoken out loud.
In his office, the story usually begins the same way: a client arrives with a practical problem — How much will this cost us? — and leaves with something less measurable: a plan to keep siblings from turning into opponents.
When I asked him what, exactly, a tax accountant becomes after years spent beside other people's endings, he paused, and then said something that sounded less like a job description than a private philosophy.
"Tax," he said, "isn't only about numbers. It's about how a state evaluates a life."
The Reason People Fear Taxes More Than They Admit
Q: You say you no longer define your work as simply filing on someone else's behalf. What changed?
A: I don't even clearly remember why I chose this profession in the first place. But after meeting so many people through consultations, I stopped seeing the work as just "making money" or "submitting returns."
At the end of many conversations, different people say almost the same thing: "They say death and taxes are unavoidable — but taxes are giving me a headache."
Sometimes it feels like taxes are the last homework assignment of a life. People understand the logic: the state needs revenue; paying taxes is a civic duty. But the reality that you may worry about taxes even at the very end — that leaves a bitter feeling, even for me.
Q: Bitter in what sense?
A: Because it isn't only financial. It becomes emotional. When the end is near, families want to talk about care, dignity, memory. And then the tax question enters the room, insisting on its own timetable.
Why He Once "Liked" Inheritance Tax
Q: You write that you liked inheritance and gift tax law when you were studying. That's… uncommon.
A: (Laughs.) It is. But yes — I liked that subject the most.
I still remember something a tax law lecturer once said: "Inheritance tax is the cost of settling a life."
It sounded strangely elegant to me. In Korea, inheritance tax rates are high, and the system applies progressive rates to the entire estate. At the time, the explanation stayed with me: it's meant to reduce the inheritance of wealth, to bring the starting line a little closer in an unfair world.
Back then, "tax" felt blunt, harsh — but I thought I could see a kind of justice, even a kind of romance, inside it.
Q: And then real life complicated that romance.
A: Real life always does.
The First Inheritance Tax Case: A Stack of Paper, a Single Sentence
Q: Do you remember your first inheritance tax filing?
A: Very clearly.
Collecting the documents took a long time. I remember thinking, "So that's why they give you six months."
Then I finally started working — and the top document in the pile was the death certificate.
It listed the time of death, the cause, and the simple fact that inheritance began at that moment. The language was calm, almost indifferent.
Q: A bureaucratic tone describing something utterly personal.
A: Exactly. And then there were the bank statements — ten years' worth.
Most people close their books annually. Ten years of transactions, at first glance, made me think: "When will I ever get through this? No more leaving the office on time for a while."
But as the deadline approached, the work didn't feel heavier.
Q: Why not?
A: Because I realized I wasn't just reviewing transactions. I was reading a life — the last ten years of it — line by line.
Here, their health was still stable. Here, even with a chronic illness, they consistently transferred living expenses to a spouse. Here, a grandchild entered university — you could see the payments, the timing, the pattern.
It wasn't the emotion I expected when I studied the law. But only then did I begin to understand why I had been drawn to inheritance tax in the first place.
Q: The documents became biography.
A: In a way, yes.
But you also learn something else very quickly: the inheritance division agreement — the negotiation among heirs — can be as sensitive and complicated as running a business.
"Tax Planning" vs. "Family Planning"
Q: People come to you wanting to reduce taxes. You don't dismiss that, but you say something else matters more. What is it?
A: I completely understand the desire to prepare in advance — to reduce what my lecturer called "the cost of settling a life."
But what I think matters more is preventing conflict among the family left behind.
At minimum, no one who worked hard to build assets wants those assets to become the reason their children fight.
Q: So what do you actually say in consultations?
A: I don't only talk about "optimal tax-saving strategies." I also explain practical tools: insurance to secure liquidity for inheritance taxes, and alternatives like testamentary trusts that can distribute assets more objectively.
To be honest, that kind of conversation doesn't immediately increase my income.
But after a consultation, sometimes a client will say, smiling: "The tax rate is fixed, so we can't change that. But at least I won't have to imagine my kids fighting up there."
When I see someone walk away like that, my commute home feels lighter.
The Room Where Fear Arrives: Tax Audits
Q: The other subject people fear is audits. How did your perspective change when you began responding to them?
A: I haven't had a direct audit on my own bookkeeping clients yet, but I've worked as support in audit-response cases.
In my first one, I began to understand taxpayers differently.
A notice clearly states an amount due — and still, some business owners say, "It's too much."
As a beginner, I used to think: "But you earned it. This is what the law says."
Then you learn the hard part: accounting and tax overlap, but accounting is a standard; tax is law. Law involves interpretation. There are too many exceptions — corporate tax, VAT, special tax treatment rules, and then exceptions to those exceptions.
I'm not saying, "It's complicated, so mistakes should be excused."
I'm saying something simpler: I don't want ignorance — not intentional evasion — to destroy someone so thoroughly that they can't stand up again.
The Small Mistake That Turns Into a Large Penalty
Q: You mention "blowback" — cases where a small misstep causes a disproportionately large consequence. What's a typical example?
A: Tax invoices.
Korea's Hometax system is highly computerized — I noticed that even more when I attended conferences abroad. But because invoices are issued electronically, some older people either ask their children to do it or attempt it themselves and make simple input mistakes: the recipient, the taxable amount.
One small error can lead to heavy penalties, depending on the size of the amount.
Q: And policy changes?
A: Real estate policy shifts, especially during the pandemic period, created cases where the difference between "asked a tax professional once more before the transaction" and "didn't ask" resulted in tens of millions — sometimes hundreds of millions — of won in tax differences.
They weren't trying to evade. They simply didn't know.
The Definition of a Tax Accountant, Rewritten
Q: So what is a Certified Tax Accountant, in your view?
A: I can't fully agree with the definition that a Certified Tax Accountant is "someone who calculates taxes."
Ironically, when I studied for the exam, I couldn't put down my calculator. But now, I use it far less.
These days I ask different questions first: Why did this transaction happen? What circumstances led to it? What was the real intention?
If you understand the substance of the transaction, many problems resolve themselves without frantic calculation.
So I think a Certified Tax Accountant should be someone who listens a lot, asks a lot, and tries to understand the situation all the way to the end.
Q: And your closing line — that tax is about how a state evaluates a life — that sounds almost like sociology.
A: Maybe it is. But when you sit with families at moments like these, you start believing it.
A Final Image
Before we ended, I asked him what document he sees most often — the one that symbolizes the profession.
He didn't say "a ledger," or "a return," or "a receipt."
He said: "The death certificate. It's always on top."
And in that answer — plain, factual, almost administrative — you could hear what he meant all along: the work begins in numbers, but it never stays there.
Im Seok-in (임석인) is a Certified Tax Accountant (세무사) and representative tax accountant at SaveTax Teheran Branch (세무법인 세이브택스 테헤란지점), specializing in inheritance tax, family asset planning, and tax audit response. His practice emphasizes the human dimensions of taxation — understanding not just the numbers, but the lives and families behind them.
