Yoon Ja-young is in charge of articles translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times. She is interested in improving the newspaper through AI.
By Yoon Ja-young
The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning is being probed on suspicions that staffers granted Google special favors when approving the global Internet firm to start mobile payment services here.
The Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) said that it is investigating the officials involved in the approval process.
The country’s telecommunications law stipulates that to operate mobile payment services, a company should have at least five staffers with more than two years’ experience in the service, have the relevant facilities, and an information protection system.
Google set up Google Payment Korea in June 2011 and applied to the ministry to register as a mobile payment service provider. However, it outsourced the service and the facility was also located in Google’s headquarters in the United States. Therefore it didn’t meet the requirements, but the ministry’s Internet policy division still went ahead and granted the approval.
According to local media reports, the country’s auditor was examining Google’s payment system following consumer complaints that it is difficult to obtain a refund from the Google Play Store.
A Google Korea spokeswoman said "We firmly believe that we met the requirements when we acquired our DCB license.".
The ICT ministry admitted that it has been audited. An official of the ministry was quoted as saying: “The issue here is that we approved it though the service was being outsourced, but there were other cases when outsourcing was accepted.”
The audit agency also confirmed probing the ministry, but it has not yet made any decision on the issue.
“We first get documents from the ministries that will be probed to review them, and then visit the ministries for an on-site probe. It sometimes takes as long as three or four months to make our final decision after the probe, as we have to hear from the organization that went through the probe as well as the third-party experts,” an official at the Board of Audit and Inspection explained.
“I can just confirm that we finished the on-site inspection, but it hasn’t been decided yet how to deal with it,” she said.
Yoon Ja-young is in charge of articles translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times. She is interested in improving the newspaper through AI.