The Overtime Allowance is Blind Money

A control room, which had a card reader to confirm ‘overtime work’, in a district office in Seoul at around 10 pm on the 25th. Several district office employees gathered at late night. Most of them got out of the work earlier and did some personal things around the office, came back to the district office, scanned their cards or put their fingers on the reader, and then disappeared. It was the spot for them to take ‘overtime pay’ illegally.

There were total of 14 employees who had been in the ready room in forty minutes since 10 pm that evening. Almost half of them seemed to have some drink. There are increasing number of cases since 3, 4 years ago that few public service personnel abused the electronic overtime pay confirm system, which was adapted by some government departments and local governments, and received unlawful allowances. Especially, entering the end of the regime, the ‘allowance thieves are increasing taking advantage of the easygoing atmosphere of the public offices. In some departments, they even collect their cards and give them to the one who get out of the work late and let the person scan them all.

A central government employee Ms. Lee (32, female) said, “It is better when a finger print recognition system is in place but in the departments that has card reading system, it is generalized to leave their card to the person on duty.” Mr. Kim (34) who works in a district office in Seoul said, “It is true that employees are manipulating the overtime allowance; however, it is considered as a unavoidable routine among the public service personnel.” Although the reality is like this, there is no supervision or restraint about that. The Board of Audit and Inspection official said, “There is no special division to check the overtime allowance, and even during the regular audit of each department, we do not pay special attention to it.”

Mr. Park (41), who used to work in an auditing division of a government department said, “Although the false report of the overtime allowance is a well known fact among the public service personnel, but the auditing division often overlook it.” In reply to this, the Policy Planning Manager of the Public Service Personnel Workplace Committee Par, Jae-Bum analyzed, “The manipulation of the overtime allowance is a phenomenon because of more immobile high ranking officers at the end of a regime and moral hazard of low ranking officers.” Professor Ha, Mi-Seung of Kunkuk University Public Administration Department said, “The overtime allowance system is necessary, but since there are many cases of manipulation, a remedy of the system must be considered and occasional check should be consolidated to not harm the fairness.”

Sun-Woo Kim sublime@donga.com