"Too Many Tasks..." Financial Supervisory Service Faces Inevitable Annual Reduction of '30+ Staff'

[Asia Economy Reporter Wondara] The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) will expand the reduction of senior positions at grade 3 and above. The previous target for reducing senior positions at the FSS was 138 people (8 percentage points) within five years, but now a new reduction plan including overseas office personnel must be submitted to avoid being re-designated as a public institution.

An FSS official said on the 29th, "We will submit a detailed plan regarding the conditional suspension to the Public Institution Management Committee within the first half of the year," adding, "We need to consult with the labor union and related organizations."

The conditional suspensions proposed by the Public Institution Management Committee include ▲additional reduction of senior positions ▲restructuring of overseas offices ▲increasing the weight of quantitative indicators from the 30% range to around 40%, and recovering performance bonuses if fraudulent activities are confirmed during evaluations ▲enhancing customer satisfaction surveys, which were previously limited to some customers, to the level of public institutions, conducting them annually, and reflecting the results in management evaluations.

The FSS had already been instructed by the Public Institution Management Committee in 2019 to reduce senior positions (grade 3 and above) to about 35% within five years, and has been implementing this. As of 2019, the FSS had 831 employees at grade 3 or above, and the directive was to reduce this to about 35% (693 people) within five years. Accordingly, the FSS reduced 21 senior employees in 2019 and 20 in 2020.

The FSS is currently deliberating on detailed plans for the high-intensity workforce reduction conditional suspensions. It is analyzed that the FSS must reduce at least 30 senior employees annually over the remaining three years, considering that the additional reduction required is 100 people plus alpha. The total number of FSS employees is 2,200. The FSS is also proceeding with bank sanctions related to the private equity fund scandal, which caused 4,000 victims and damages amounting to 2 trillion won. There have been concerns that the independence and supervisory functions of the FSS will weaken if it is re-designated as a public institution. An FSS official said, "Since we have been implementing the conditional suspensions by squeezing every last drop, there will need to be many consultations in preparing the detailed plan."

Meanwhile, the Public Institution Management Committee stated that if the FSS does not comply with the additional conditional suspensions, it will actively consider designating it as a public institution. The committee said, "Since the existing conditional suspensions have been generally well implemented, we decided to withhold the public institution designation but impose strengthened conditions," adding, "If future performance is insufficient, we plan to actively consider the public institution designation."

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