Translated by SOORIN KIM(voluntarily activist)
The Korean Government Employees’ Union accused on wrongful use 2010 official expenses
Solution of non-transparency and corruption on official expenses are one of civil society’s long-cherished wishs
The <official’s expense>
of local government heads is a special type of budget that the high ranking officials
can use flexibly on the various situation when expenses are hard to be
reflected in the budget one by one. Thus, the <official’s expense> is
especially a very sensitive type of budget that may draw out many doubts if not
disclosed the details of expenditures to public specifically and transparently.
So, The Center for Freedom
of Information and Transparent Society (CHOI) tried to evaluate how well the
<official’s expense> of local governments were spent or dealt with
transparency.
First of all, we classified
the information concerning the <official’s expense> that need to be
opened into 6 items; period, purposes, beneficiary of the expense and number of
people, place the payment was taken place, method of payment (cash, credit
card, etc.). Then we have closely studied each record on the local government
head’s <official’s expense> released by 16 major local governments of
South Korea to see whether the 6 essential items were included in the records.
Finally, we have drawn a table showing each government’s degree of transparency
regarding the <official’s expense>. The result is below;
*this table reflected official expenses condition data of local government till 7th, june, 2011.
The transparencies of each of the local governments vary greatly. This is because each local government makes its own lists of public information on official expenses due to non-existence of one form to show official expenses.
If you look at the table, you
can notice that almost all local governments missed at least one out of six
essential items that need to be specified. Also, the quantity and quality of
the information on the <official’s expense> released by each local
governments vary remarkably.
Among 16 local governments,
those that had most serious problems with the <official’s expense> are Incheon,
Busan, Daegu and Chungcheongbuk-do. The mayors and governor of these local
governments did not include any of 6 essential items mentioned above. These four
governments only disclosed total amount of the money spent and vague purposes
of execution so we couldn’t know the details at all. In case of Gyeongsangbuk-do,
because the purposes of the payment were written with extreme ambiguity such as
‘conferences’ or ‘meals’, the exact purposes couldn’t be identified.
On the contrary, Daejeon
and Gyeonggi-do opened the details of there <official’s expenses> reports
transparently. Daejeon metropolitan city identified the purposes of payments
relatively specifically and clearly while Gyeonggi-do province had detailed
records of where and how the officials used the money. There were very few
local autonomous entities that actually disclosed the exact purpose of the
expenses, the beneficiary and the number of them. Only Daejeon and Gyeonggi-do
opened the information.
Evaluating the transparency
of the <official’s expenses> of 16 local entities, we were overall very
disappointed. Until the governmental budget executions like the <official’s
expenses> get transparent, CFOI will never loosen surveillance and
criticism.