'Final Pass Despite Ineligible Qualifications'... Gyeonggi-do Uncovers 27 Cases of Improper Hiring in Public Institutions

Gyeonggi Provincial Government

Improper hiring practices continue to persist in Gyeonggi Province's affiliated organizations.

Gyeonggi Province announced on the 24th that it formed an audit team of 43 members across 8 divisions and conducted a special audit on the overall hiring and regular employee conversion processes carried out by public institutions from July 5 to August 31. The audit uncovered 27 cases of improper actions, including hiring unqualified applicants.

The audit targeted 24 out of 28 public institutions under the province, excluding Gyeonggi Social Service Institute, which was covered by a comprehensive audit; Gyeonggi Technopark (Ansan City) and KINTEX (Goyang City), which were audited by their respective city and county governments; and Gyeonggi Social Economy Institute, established on December 7 last year.

Key findings include that Hospital A of Gyeonggi Medical Center hired an applicant who should have been disqualified due to lack of qualifications by processing them as eligible and appointing them after the interview. Hospitals B and C improperly awarded additional points despite interview scores below 70 points being grounds for automatic failure and ineligible for extra points, resulting in unfair hiring.

Korea Gyeonggi Corporation deviated from the hiring plan established by the CEO during the recruitment of experienced staff by selecting one additional successful candidate in two fields each, and ultimately appointed three applicants who did not meet the experience criteria.

However, in the case of Korea Gyeonggi Corporation, personnel audits cannot be conducted under the "Act on the Operation of Local Government-Funded and Contributed Institutions," so this inspection was carried out as part of the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission’s comprehensive survey plan.

Through this audit, Gyeonggi Province requested disciplinary actions including caution (14 cases), correction (6 cases), improvement (4 cases), recommendation/notification (2 cases), institutional warning (1 case), minor disciplinary action (3 people), reprimand (12 people), and caution (2 people) across 18 public institutions.

Since 2017, Gyeonggi Province has been conducting special audits on public institution hiring practices annually to check the appropriateness of hiring procedures and any misconduct.

The number of detected hiring irregularities has decreased from 75 cases in the first year to 27 cases this year. The number of severe disciplinary actions or referrals for prosecution and investigation has also dropped from 2 cases in the first year to none in the past two years.

Despite continuous special audits on hiring practices, minor errors and procedural violations still occur annually. To address this, Gyeonggi Province produced and distributed the "Gyeonggi Province Public Institution Hiring Guidebook," which includes step-by-step hiring guidelines and various audit case examples to each public institution.

Choi Eun-soon, Auditor of Gyeonggi Province, stated, "The number of hiring corruption cases has steadily decreased through the special audits on public institution hiring practices, indicating that a culture of fair hiring is taking root. Gyeonggi Province will continue to make various efforts to ensure fair hiring opportunities for everyone."

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