Parties clash over tax audit results

The Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) on Sunday asked for an inquiry into the alleged disposal of the documents on tax audit of media companies conducted in 1994. The Grand National Party GNP) called for a probe by prosecutors instead of parliamentary investigations into the case demanded by the MDP.

The ruling party spokesman Kim Young-Hwan said if the audit report was done away with in the flurry of power change in 1998, it clearly violated law because such official papers are required to be kept for five years. He urged the National Assembly to look into the allegations about when and how they were disposed of and who ordered them to be scrapped.

A highly placed official of the governing party said those papers could be restored and retrieved even though they might have been discarded during the period of transition. There are people who throw away such documents and also others who preserve them for future accounting, he said, strongly suggesting the possibility of their copies being in somebody`s good keep. The opposition party objected to parliamentary investigations, calling for a prosecution inquiry to determine if the papers disappeared through negligence or were deliberately destroyed when a the new administration took over.

Sources at the National Tax Service refused to confirm whether the audit report was disposed of or not, but said that its Commissioner Ahn Jung-Nam could disclose the facts about them before the National Assembly Finance-Economy Committee on Monday.

Song In-Soo issong@donga.com