The anti-corruption agency unveiled a plan Monday to press ahead with legislation aimed once again at toughening penalties against corrupt public servants during its policy briefing for President Park Geun-hye.
The Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission (ACRC) said the tentatively-named Anti-Corruption and Conflicts of Interest Act will be submitted to the National Assembly by June in an effort to uproot corruption in officialdom that is still rampant despite various extraordinary measures.
Under the so-called "Kim Young-ran law,’’ civil servants caught accepting more than 1 million won in bribes will receive sentences of up to three years in jail or fines of up to five times the amount in kickbacks received ― regardless of whether they accept the money in return for favors. This clause is considered to be a necessary measure to punish government officials who have escaped penalties by arguing that they didn’t receive the money in return for favors with strings attached. Kim Young-ran was a former ACRC head who proposed the legislation.
The draft of the law also bars civil servants from performing duties that could involve conflicts of interest and prohibits making illegal requests to officials via a middleman. To regulate "revolving-door appointments’’ in which retired officials return to the public sector after working for private firms, the bill obliges them to report what they have done for the previous two years.
If this law had existed earlier, there would not have been an appointment fiasco involving former Defense Minister-designate Kim Byung-kwan who bowed out of the ministerial nomination process, primarily over his connection to a local arms broker. And prosecutors who were cleared of corruption charges in 2010 would have faced criminal charges.
Therefore, it appears that the bill will easily be approved by the Assembly, but things are not that simple. Last year, an anti-corruption organization began a process of translating the proposal into law but there has been little progress owing to opposition from the Justice Ministry and other government agencies.
The rationale behind their opposition is that it would be overblown to impose criminal penalties only because the recipients of money or lavish entertainment are public servants.
This argument sounds plausible in a sense, but given our current corruption status ― Korea’s corruption perception index was ranked 43rd among 183 countries last year ― entirely unacceptable. This is because higher moral standards are required of public servants. The proposed anti-corruption law must be legislated at any cost if our society is to progress further by cutting away the chains of corruption.