Gunawan Lim

Background

About Gunawan Lim

Hi there! I am a corporate tax consultant with some experience in Indonesian local compliance, local tax dispute resolution, and transfer pricing. I have served many corporate clients from various industries, such as plantation, services, manufacturing, telcos, IT services, and other digital services. As a consultant, my main purpose is to help clients. Therefore, I believe that my task is not merely to do what the client’s asked for, but also to educate them. A tax consultant is not like a doctor who can cure an illness. Most of the tax risk exposures often arise from the underlying transactions that have already done in the past and, hence, we could not turn back time and fixed what have happened already. In this kind of event, what a tax consultant can normally do is often limited to assisting clients in managing their tax outcome. That is why I believe that the best way to help my clients is by educating them so that they could better understand the tax implication of their own transactions and better manage their own tax risks as well. I also believe that tax and accounting should not be separated. Every tax objective, either compliance, dispute resolution, or planning, basically relies on the accounting records. Therefore, aside from having sufficient knowledge in tax regulation, I have also maintained proper understanding in the accounting standard and business process. Thorough my career so far, I have learnt that my accounting knowledge has helped me a lot in many tasks, either in understanding client’s business process, tracing the root cause of the tax exposures, and even as a basis for preparing audit defense. I feel really blessed to be able to learn it in college in the first place. Last but not least, I am also proficient in excel and currently still expanding my knowledge in its macro features and other supporting software too. In the middle of the rapid development of technology, the way how we work in finance industry, especially as a consultant, should also be updated. We should optimize the utilization of available technologies in order to enhance the quality of our work. Thorough my career, I have made several working papers and developed some macro models which helped me improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of my performance and my colleagues’. Nonetheless, I am still eager to learn many more regarding this topic, especially in process automation and AI.