The Board of Audit and Inspection Creates a Center for Management Assessment

The Board of Audit and Inspection will establish a center for assessing management of state-run agencies in order to more closely monitor management of public enterprises like KBS (Korean Broadcasting System) in the future.

The Center for Management Assessment will make it mandatory that state-run agencies submit regular reports on their management restructuring compiled by outside monitoring agencies and let management take a responsibility in case restructuring process makes little progress.

“As is shown in the case of KBS, although the Board of Audit and Inspection had made several recommendations for correcting management failures, the restructuring process had been dropped due to institutional loopholes with no legal penalties. Thus, we decided to establish a center for assessing management of state-run agencies to be controlled by the Board of Audit and Inspection,” a senior Board official said on Sunday.

“KBS must now submit to annual testing by an independent agency, which will report its results directly to the Board of Audit and Inspection. The Board of Audit and Inspection assessment center will reevaluate KBS’s management and the results of its own restructuring process,” he said.

Firstly, the Board will review whether KBS does comply with recommendations on its own. If KBS does not perform its restructuring properly, the Board will recommend that the National Assembly revise the Broadcasting Act and review some ways of reprimanding KBS management and giving disadvantages in budget allocations.

Public agencies like KBS have long been exempt from the government’s management laws and so have not been punished when their management failures were discovered. However, the government has decided that it needs to exercise some control through performance ratings and budget allocations to guarantee the efficiency of management and identity of public broadcasting

The Board of Audit and Inspection is expected to expand the Center’s monitoring activities beyond KBS to other state-run agencies which they believe have not been performing their restructuring adequately.

Young-Hae Choi yhchoi65@donga.com