Anti-corruption Policy to Realize Transparency in Seoul

The Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) will establish and implement the 2017 Anti-corruption and Transparency Policy Promotion Plan consisting of four strategies (① Continued promotion of innovative measures to reform public offices, ② Reinforcement of the corruption prevention system, ③ Expansion of support for a transparent culture within organizations, ④ Utilization of the private governance) and 15 core tasks in order to realize a clean city where the public office culture is clean and transparent and the anti-corruption policy interacts with the citizens.

< Continued implementation of the Park Won Soon Act and operation of the compliance of transparency >

The SMG will stabilize the anti-corruption system and establish an effective system by continuing to strictly and uniformly implement the ‘Park Won Soon Act (Reform measures of the public offices in Seoul),’ which penalizes bribery of any kind regardless of its connection to work in 2017. The paradigm will shift from ‘Regulations and Punishments’ to ‘Joint implementation of Self-regulation, Prevention, Communication, and Governance.’ To that end, strict regulations will be sustained while ‘passive administration’ will cease to exist, to establish a transparent culture based on voluntary participation, responsibility, communication, and trust.

< Reinforce the anti-corruption system to prevent corruption and realize a just administration >

The SMG set up a Public Interest Report Investigation T/F team (Jan. 16, 2017) and reinforced post monitoring to ensure the rights of citizens and public officers who hesitate to make reports on the behalf of the public interest even after bearing witness to internal corruption and injustice and strengthen support, both legal and financial , for them. The Cheongbaek-e (integrated real-time monitoring) system is the core project of the internal self-regulation system. It will connect with the five administrative information systems of local governments to act as an auditor that prevents accidents by sending automatic warnings to managers, supervisors, and auditors when an administrative error or corruption occurs. The SMG will also root out corrupt practices such as receiving bribes through concentrated auditing and reinforced inspection of corruption-prone areas such as private consignment and subsidy projects (713 projects with a total revenue of KRW 2.4 trillion.)

< Expansion of support for transparent culture within organizations through operation of the “Transparency Supporters” >

On January 16, 2017, the SMG set up the Transparent Policy T/F Team within the Audit Office under the Audit and Inspection Commission which is dedicated to the effective promotion of the anti-corruption policy and the internalization of the transparent culture. The SMG seeks to continue to reform the mindset of public officers and cultivate the ethical awareness of public officers through implementation of companywide ‘Mandatory transparency education’ and ‘Customized transparency education.’ Starting in March 2017, the SMG will also designate and operate the Transparency Supporters, which will audit transparency in each department, in order to promote employee interest in transparency and establish a communication network across the organization.

< Operation of the Citizen Transparency Monitors and utilization of private governance >

The SMG plans to establish a social consensus for the formation of a transparent city by operating a Citizen Monitoring Group where the people take charge. The group will carry out transparency monitoring such as proposal of transparent ideas, promotion of transparency policies, discovery of corruption-prone areas in the administration, request for system improvement, and improvement of blind spots where the public administration had not been able to reach until now.

The SMG will receive proposals on how to enhance transparency in Seoul (January 20 – March 10, 2017) through the Transparent Policy Idea Contest (Asking 10 million Seoulites the way to make Seoul City Transparent) to realize a transparent administration that is trusted by the people and communicates with the people. It will also promote the establishment of a transparency policy that interacts with the people and improve the rate of transparency by gathering ways to improve transparency from the members of the Seoul Transparency Policy Advisory Board consisting of anti-corruption experts in academia and local communities and collect ideas from SMG employees as well.