(EDITORIAL from The Korea Times on Oct. 18)

Dereliction of duty
: Inspection agency slammed over subsidy scandal

The state inspection agency has come under criticism for having delayed the disclosure of its investigation results about illegal recipients of farm subsidies for 15 months.

The agency in question is the Board of Audit and
Inspection (BAI), which decided not to reveal the outcome in July 2007 after
reporting it to the presidential office. As the scandal came to a head Tuesday,
the board unveiled that 280,000 of 998,000 recipients illegally benefited from
the compensation scheme for rice growers.
The scandal sent a shockwave throughout the nation. It is South Korea's largest
corruption scandal ever involving 46,000 civil servants and employees of
state-run enterprises who illegally received farm subsidies. The 280,000
ineligible beneficiaries pocketed 168 billion won in 2006 alone. The public
servants and government-owned firms' employees must have forgotten their duty and
responsibility in an illegal bid to satisfy their own interests at the expense of
the public good.
It is necessary for these civil servants, especially ranking officials, to be
subject to not only harsh disciplinary action but also stern criminal punishment.
They are suspected of having applied for subsidies by filing false reports that
they were rice farmers. Their reception of farm subsidies is nothing but a
fraudulent scam cheating the government and the people. It should serve as an
opportunity to restore the lost ethics and morality of government employees as
well as push for public sector reform.
It is urgent for the authorities to make sure that only eligible farmers are
granted rice subsidies, which were introduced in 2005 to compensate rice growers
for their loss from the opening of the local rice market to cheap imports. The
government is also required to conduct an investigation into the BAI to uncover
why the inspection agency failed to make public such a grave scandal until this
month.
The BAI found out early last year that 30 percent of the subsidies recipients
were non-farmers. And it sorted out a list of 170,000 illegal recipients in terms
of their occupations, which included civil servants, state-run firms' employees,
doctors, lawyers and others. The BAI reported the list to Cheong Wa Dae around
June 2007. And then it scrapped the list to prevent leakage of confidential
individual information.
But the question is why the BAI had tried not to unveil the scandal. Speculations
have it that the previous government of President Roh Moo-hyun might have hidden
the scandal five months before the December presidential election. Critics
claimed the Roh administration blocked the BAI from disclosing it in an apparent
bid to avoid its adverse impact on the election.
The BAI made public 85 cases of its investigations last year, while keeping six
cases in the dark. It usually does not disclose its probe results as long as they
are concerned with national security or the state secrets. No one can easily find
proper reasons for the BAI's decision on this scandal. Rather, the agency should
have unveiled it immediately to fix the problem. If there had been any pressure
from the presidential office, it could have dealt a severe blow to the inspection
agency's political neutrality and independence.
There is little doubt that the delayed disclosure of the subsidy scam constitutes
dereliction of duty on the part of the inspection agency as well as the Roh
government. Thorough investigations are urgently needed to get to the bottom of
this case.
(END)