카테고리 없음

Transparency of Local Government head’s spending, is it okay to leave it as it is now?

opengirok 2011. 8. 16. 15:42


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.


original Korean version of this post and attached files