Gyeonggi-do, Permanent Exclusion from Support if R&D Funds Are Used for Other Purposes

[Asia Economy (Suwon) = Reporter Lee Young-gyu] Gyeonggi Province will transparently disclose evaluation details when supporting various research and development (R&D) project funds. In addition, if fraudulent use of support funds is detected, the entity will be permanently excluded from support eligibility.

On the 14th, Gyeonggi Province announced the "Improvement Plan for Technology Development and Regional Cooperation Research Center Projects," focusing on enhancing fairness, transparency, and autonomy of the province's representative R&D policies, such as the Gyeonggi Province Technology Development Project and the Regional Cooperation Research Center (GRRC) project, to realize a virtuous cycle ecosystem that forms the foundation of the 4th Industrial Revolution.

To this end, the province will improve the support project evaluation system by transparently disclosing evaluation details such as application competition rates, company-specific evaluation scores, evaluation comments, and selection scores, which were not previously disclosed.

Until now, companies that failed the screening could not even know what was lacking, but going forward, evaluations of selected companies will also be referenced and utilized for future support.

The pool of evaluation committee members will be increased from 1,200 to 2,000, and evaluators for rapidly changing new technology fields will be recruited on an ongoing basis.

Thirteen types of paper documents previously submitted by mail will be replaced with electronic documents, and the processes of submission, evaluation, and changes in technology development will be computerized to enhance convenience so that researchers can focus on technology development.

Additionally, the technology fee system has been significantly reformed to reduce the burden on researchers.

The "fixed technology fee," which uniformly required companies without sales to return 10% of the support amount, will be abolished. Instead, the "success technology fee" will be restructured so that if a company's sales increase by more than 50 times the support amount within three years after project completion, 50% of the support amount will be returned.

However, companies that pay the success technology fee will also receive separate incentives such as additional R&D support.

Furthermore, the technology fee, which was imposed up to 60% of the support ratio on universities and research institutions, will be abolished, and compensation for participating researchers will be expanded to further encourage research and development at nonprofit institutions.

The technology fee system is a system where companies return a certain amount as compensation for the utilization and acquisition of rights of the outcomes after completing technology development projects funded by government or local government support.

In addition, the evaluation period will be shortened from three months to one month to reduce the budget, and an "R&D Graduation System" will be introduced, limiting the number of support times to a maximum of three to allow more support.

Moreover, a penalty surcharge of up to five times the amount of fraudulent research fund use will be imposed, and the names of companies and principal investigators confirmed to have misused funds will be disclosed. A "one-strike-out system" will also be introduced, permanently excluding entities confirmed to have misused research funds from support projects.

Until now, even if misuse such as embezzlement or misappropriation of research funds occurred, only the amount was recovered, failing to prevent moral hazard. The province has unified the reporting channel for research and development fund corruption to the Gyeonggi Province Public Interest Reporting Hotline "Fair Economy 2580."

Lim Moon-young, Director of Future Growth Policy at the province, said, "Based on this improvement plan, we will comprehensively revise various regulations and finalize and announce the '2020 Gyeonggi Province R&D Project Basic Plan.' We will take a step further in strengthening fairness and transparency and realizing a virtuous cycle ecosystem for R&D."

Meanwhile, it was found that through the technology development project, from 2008 to 2019, a total of 130 billion KRW was supported for 750 projects over 12 years, resulting in an economic ripple effect of 591.5 billion KRW and the creation of 5,028 jobs.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.