Prosecutors' Office Faces Difficulties Building 'Investigation Network'... Growing Concerns Over 'Declining Investigative Capability'

Failure to Select Contractor for Criminal Justice Information System, Second Procurement Initiated... "Difficulties in Prompt and Accurate Task Processing"

[Asia Economy Reporter Baek Kyunghwan] The establishment of the Criminal Justice Information System (KICS·KIX) by the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials (CIO) is being delayed. As a system to computerize investigative work and link information with related agencies, the CIO has been conducting its operations manually since its launch in January. Due to the delay in building KIX, the CIO's investigative activities are also expected to face restrictions.

According to the legal community on the 2nd, the CIO recently failed to select a contractor for the KIX construction project and has launched a second bidding. With no bidders at all, the CIO issued the project through a competitive bidding process.

KIX is a system that manages criminal case information electronically and provides it to related agencies. Prosecutors, courts, and others also share and use information through similar systems. Since its launch in January, the CIO has managed over 1,000 cases mainly on paper. This includes registering cases and handling tasks such as fact-finding and criminal record checks, but there was no data repository to manage related records.

Therefore, last month, stating that "immediate investigation is necessary upon official launch, but there is no supporting system," the CIO began selecting a contractor. Even Kim Jin-wook, the head of the CIO, said, "Computerization of the entire criminal justice work is expected to improve transparency and reliability of operations," and added, "We will promptly build the system to establish it early."

However, having recently failed to select a contractor, the CIO has started the second bidding. This time as well, they submitted an urgent bidding justification letter to the Public Procurement Service requesting to minimize the bidding process.

The legal community expects that if the CIO’s contractor selection process continues to be delayed, greater restrictions on investigative activities will occur. Following the selection of the first case, the 'allegation of unfair special hiring of dismissed teachers by Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education Superintendent Cho Hee-yeon,' the CIO has consecutively started investigations into the second and third cases, so administrative inefficiency due to the absence of KIX is inevitably accumulating.

According to internal CIO documents, the absence of KIX is causing difficulties in case processing delays and administrative inefficiency. Case processing and inter-agency data exchange are done manually, making it difficult to handle tasks quickly and accurately or to grasp the progress of investigations. For example, not only case registration but also suspect and witness interviews, criminal record checks, wanted notices, and travel bans are all conducted manually, causing overload as the number of cases handled by the CIO increases.

However, the CIO maintains its existing plan to complete contractor selection within this month and finish system construction by early next year. In the second contractor selection process, they are also considering speeding up the project through direct contracts after suitability assessments. A CIO official stated, "We will focus administrative efforts to ensure that the (KIX) system, which aims to improve investigative efficiency, is established early."

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