Audit Board Chairman: "Must Block Complacency and Passive Administration Exploiting Election Season"

Choi Jae-hae, Chairman of the Board of Audit and Inspection, Delivers New Year's Address... "Prioritizing Audit Operations to Meet Public Demand for Accountability"

[Asia Economy Reporter Ryu Jeong-min] Choi Jae-hae, Chairman of the Board of Audit and Inspection, stated in his "2022 New Year's Address" announced on the 3rd, "This year, in particular, we must prevent complacency and passive administration that ride on the election season atmosphere."

Chairman Choi said, "I also want to place emphasis on establishing public service discipline to realize a working public service society."

Chairman Choi emphasized, "For local governments, which have extensive public contact points such as civil complaints and permits, it is necessary to conduct broad audits mainly through regular institutional audits and to ensure that the public service discipline at the frontline sites does not deteriorate."

[Image source=Yonhap News]

Chairman Choi explained, "To eradicate increasingly covert and sophisticated public service corruption, we plan to strengthen inspection activities by conducting focused monitoring on vulnerable areas such as contracts and personnel affairs."

Furthermore, Chairman Choi pledged, "Above all, we will prioritize audit operations to meet the public's demand for audits."

Chairman Choi explained, "The Board of Audit and Inspection has so far selected audit items by considering priorities for national issues or matters requiring urgent inspection. Considering that the diverse audit demands of the public are being expressed through audit requests and audit reports, we intend to focus our audit capabilities on promptly responding to the public's demands."

Chairman Choi said, "Instead of having a dedicated department for requests, all audit departments should directly handle public proposal audits related to their respective duties. Also, the Board's annual audit plan should be flexibly established with some spare capacity so that audit requests occurring throughout the year can be responded to immediately."

Chairman Choi added, "If the request does not clearly fall under dismissal criteria such as lacking formal requirements, audits should be actively conducted based on the principle of maximum auditing. Even if no problems are found in the audit results, detailed answers should be provided to questions that the public was curious about."

Chairman Choi said, "The planned audit items directly discovered by the Board should be faithful to the basics but selected by listening to the voices of the public," and added, "We must be faithful to the Board's original mission of national settlement inspection and its role in finance and accounting."

Chairman Choi urged, "National settlement inspection is the Board of Audit and Inspection's original mission granted by the Constitution and a core function that guarantees the proper execution of large-scale national budgets. We must focus audit capabilities on high-risk projects and carefully examine the overall budget formulation and execution of projects."

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