An anti-corruption system will be introduced to remove the risks of corruption and irregularities from large-scale national projects and defense projects with big budgets, such as the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and Public Safety-LTE.

At a press conference held on January 12 at the Government Complex in Seoul, Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn stated that as a new approach to eradicating corruption, the government will launch the "4 Corruption Vaccines Project" this year, targeting public systems in 16 areas to which a total budget of KRW 240 trillion has been allocated.

The new anti-corruption project is composed of 4 elements: real-time monitoring, risk management, information connecting, and internal control.

The core purpose of this project is to proactively prevent possible damages caused by corruption, including large-scale budget waste, by grafting the open government partnership onto the overall public system.

Accordingly, the government will shift its anti-corruption schemes from reactive measures based on detection and punishment, to preventive mechanisms that can monitor and warn against the risks of corruption.

The "4 Corruption Vaccines Project" will prioritize the areas which require investment of huge financial resources and are highly susceptible to corruption due to an inherent risk of moral hazard or abuse of discretion.

First of all, for the projects that will take up a huge amount of the national budget, the government will monitor the progress of the project in real-time, by organizing a separate inspection team from the stage before the start of the project.

The large-scale national project management team of the Office for Government Policy Coordination will apply the real-time monitoring system to the large-scale national projects amounting to KRW 25 trillion in total, including the Public Safety-LTE project (KRW 1.7 trillion), preparation for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics (KRW 5.3 trillion), creation of the Science Belt (KRW 5.9 trillion), and installation of the GTX (Great Train Express) for metropolitan areas and other large-scale SOC projects (KRW 12.7 trillion).

Those projects that can have far-reaching effects on the citizens, including the Public Safety-LTE project and Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, will be managed dually by the separate inspection teams of the relevant ministries such as the Ministry of Public Safety and Security and the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. The Defense Project Inspector's Office will also be created in order to prevent budget waste and corruption in defense projects as well as to reinforce the defense capacity.

The government will establish a preemptive risk management system for the areas that have a high possibility of corruption and irregularities because of the massive amount of financial resources or the exclusive nature of the projects.

According to this plan, Korea Post, which employs its asset of about KRW 105 trillion, will expand and reorganize the risk management department and establish a multi-level inspection system, including a compliance officer and a supervisory agency. The Korea Trade Insurance Corporation, which exclusively carries out trade insurance programs, has introduced risk management systems by advancing the procedures for setting the guarantee limit and reinforcing the internal and external inspection systems.

Budget leakage and waste caused by fraudulent benefit claims will be prevented through information sharing and connecting between project management systems to cross-check qualifications, etc.

For public subsidies, the national subsidy integrated management system will be established by 2017 to prevent fraudulent claims. For national R&D projects, a new system will be established by 2017 to connect the databases of the National Health Insurance, Employment Insurance, and National Tax Service so that false claims for research funds can be automatically extracted. The benefit fraud detection system, which integrates the information of the 4 major social insurances, will be expanded to detect false claims for unemployment benefits by sharing information of relevant agencies including the National Tax Service.

In addition, the government will reinforce internal control systems mainly for the areas involving broad discretion over the private sector, such as regulation, inspection and supervision, in order to increase transparency and fairness in these areas. To this end, a case control system that accords with international standards and practices will be established for fair trade investigation to address declining confidence in law enforcement due to an increasing number of lost cases caused in part by coercive investigation or procedural flaws.

Moreover, a fast-track process will be introduced in patent trials to ly protect the patents of start-up SMEs. A task force team consisting of relevant government agencies will also be organized to solve the difficulties of SMEs caused by patent disputes or technology extortion.

To strengthen the self-inspection capability of central administrative agencies, the independence and professionalism of the internal inspection body of each agency will be further enhanced by introducing the self-assessment on corruption risks and increasing the number of external auditors.

The successful implementation of the '4 Corruption Vaccines Project' is expected to save KRW 5 trillion, which is about 4% of the related budget of KRW 135 trillion.