Anti-Corruption Commission Recommends System Improvement… Ministry of Economy and Finance, Public Institutions Accept Improvement Plan
(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Hong Guk-gi – The practice of leniently reducing disciplinary actions in public institutions based on the commendations from the heads of these institutions, without examining misconduct, is expected to be eliminated.
On the 30th, the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission announced that it had prepared an improvement plan for the reduction of disciplinary actions in public institutions. This plan has been accepted by the Ministry of Economy and Finance and 327 public institutions.
According to the Commission’s investigation, over the past five years, there have been a total of 139,000 commendations in public institutions, with 68.9% being issued by the heads of these institutions.
Among those disciplined, 456 cases had disciplinary actions reduced based on commendations from the heads of public institutions, which accounted for 49.4% of total disciplinary cases.
Remarkably, there were instances where commendations awarded by the heads of public institutions in the 1990s were used to reduce disciplinary actions.
Particularly, some public institutions even reduced disciplinary actions for serious misconduct, such as sexual offenses, drunk driving, recruitment irregularities, and abuse of authority. The Public Officials Disciplinary Decree and public enterprise management guidelines prohibit the reduction of disciplinary actions for serious misconduct.
In public institutions where 80% of the personnel committee consisted of internal members, there were cases where the disciplinary level was reduced by three stages (dismissal to six months’ salary reduction) merely due to the reasoning that the disciplinary request was excessive.
Therefore, the Commission proposed excluding commendations unrelated to job performance, such as awards from various competitions, acts of kindness, training, and volunteer activities, from being grounds for reducing disciplinary actions. It also suggested limiting the duplicate application of reduced disciplinary actions based on the same commendation.
Moreover, for commendations eligible for disciplinary reduction, the improvement plan included setting a validity period to prevent the abuse of disciplinary reductions based on commendations.
Additionally, the plan calls for precisely defining the prohibited misconduct acts for which disciplinary reductions are not allowed, in line with those specified in the Public Officials Disciplinary Decree, and eliminating ambiguous reasons for disciplinary reduction to establish objective and clear standards.
Furthermore, the improvement plan includes expanding the number of external members in disciplinary committees to more than half of the total members and specifying detailed and precise grounds for excluding, challenging, or avoiding members with conflicts of interest.