'Eye for Real Stories' program on TV

By Semoon Chang

I live in Mobile, Alabama. You might call me a southern redneck. However, you may also know that we have a huge Hyundai Auto plant only 150 miles from where I live, and there is a regular shipping schedule between Mobile and Busan, both port cities. In Mobile, we have two good on-line cable TV packages: Comcast and AT&T. I subscribe to the AT&T U-verse package that, to my pleasant surprise, includes MBC for a little extra. I think it is aired through MBC-America in Los Angeles.

One program on MBC that caught my eye is the “Eye for Real Stories” which is a 25-minute nightly program. It is hosted by two very good reporters ― Kim Jae-won and Park Yeon-kyung. The production group must spend a lot of time and effort to produce the program. It tells us sad stories of people who lost money to friends and relatives whom they trusted, who lost their lives through automobile accidents, and who experience complex human relations.

Because of my background as a forensic economist, every time I watch the program, I pay special attention to monetary damages that victims have to suffer from. Forensic economists are those economists who assist lawyers mostly in civil cases. I have worked on well over 100 cases for both plaintiffs and defendants. When I hear the painful voices of victims in the “Eye” program, I always wonder whether they recovered their losses through civil lawsuits and, if not, why not.

In a nutshell, when the victim files a civil suit, they become the plaintiff. The person who is sued is called the defendant in the litigation. Calculating the accurate amount of a loss is not easy. That is what forensic economists do for attorneys on both sides of civil litigation. The attorney for the plaintiff wants to know how much loss is caused by the wrongful act, while the one for the defendant wants to know how much should be paid liability is proven. Let me give you two examples.

Suppose someone stole one million won (about $1,000) from an elderly couple, either in cash or goods. Later, the couple found who the thief was and decided to file a lawsuit to recover the loss. The amount that needs to be recovered should be more than one million won since the loss should also include interest that the million won could have earned, lawyer’s fees, and a loss from inflation if there is a big gap between the time when the money was stolen and the time when the money is recovered through litigation.

The second example relates to one of the “Eye” reports in which someone was killed in an automobile crash caused by a reckless driver who was driving an expensive imported car. This is a classic wrongful death case with the defendant clearly being capable of compensating the victim’s family for the economic loss.

To calculate the amount of economic loss to the crash victim, we need to know the date of birth so that we can calculate the so-called work life, which measures how many more years the victim could have worked without the crash. I am assuming that a reasonable work life table is available in Korea. We then need to gather earnings records of the victim so that we can calculate the base earning, which is the annual earning of the victim at the time of the crash. We obtain the rate of growth of the base earning and the discount rate. The growth rate is needed to project future lost earnings from the base earning. Discount rate is needed because all future projected earnings need to be converted to today’s price when the actual payment for future lost earnings is made.

Unfortunately, this is not the end of the calculation. The deceased had fringe benefits such as paid vacation, company-provided retirement, health insurance, and more. The amount of lost fringe benefits should be calculated and added to the loss. Although it may vary among local laws, taxes on earnings that the deceased could have paid need to be subtracted. When all these steps are completed, the plaintiffs who could be surviving family members of the deceased may demand the value of pain and suffering as well as attorney’s fees.

What I want to see in the “Eye” program is for the program to go back to some of past cases and see whether the victims were adequately compensated. If they were not, the legal profession in Korea may want to advance the use of the civil litigation to help the many poor and weak victims introduced in the “Eye” program.

Semoon Chang is the director of Gulf Coast Center for Impact Studies.