Legal limbo: Mishandling of audit official's graft case exposes holes in South Korea's criminal justice system

The prosecution's April 22 announcement of how it handled the bribery case involving a senior official of the state audit agency exposes a serious flaw in South Korea's criminal justice system. The Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials sought an arrest warrant in November 2023 for a Board of Audit and Inspection official on charges of receiving about 1.58 billion won ($1.07 million) in bribes over 19 occasions. The board had referred the official for investigation. The bribes allegedly came from construction firms that had won contracts from institutions subject to his audits. However, when the court denied the warrant request, citing insufficient evidence and other reasons, the investigation office transferred the case to the prosecution without conducting any further investigation into the reasons for the denial. In January 2024, the prosecution asked the CIO to conduct a supplementary investigation, but the office refused, arguing that the prosecution had no authority to make such a request. The prosecution then moved to conduct the supplementary investigation itself and applied for a search-and-seizure warrant in May last year, but the court rejected the request, saying the prosecution had no legal basis to investigate a case under the CIO's jurisdiction. With the statute of limitations about to expire, the prosecution indicted the official only on three counts involving 290 million won in bribes — based on relatively clear evidence secured by the CIO during its initial investigation — while declining to prosecute the remaining 16 allegations involving 1.29 billion won due to insufficient evidence. Institutional flaws and the prevention of the prosecution from either requesting an investigation or carrying out one itself resulted in a failure to properly investigate a bribery case involving a high-ranking public official. It is nothing short of absurd. The primary reason this major corruption case involving a senior official fizzled out lies with the CIO's failure to conduct a proper investigation from the outset. A bigger problem is the law governing the CIO, which prevents the prosecution from requesting supplementary investigations. The launch of the CIO may have served to check the prosecution, but the CIO appears instead to have thrown the existing investigative system into disarray and become an obstacle to the realization of justice. The CIO, established during the administration of Moon Jae-in, has faced persistent controversy over hasty and poorly handled investigations since its launch. This was largely because the ruling Democratic party pushed the CIO Act through by means of political deals with minor opposition parties. The ruling party and the government must move quickly to fix the loopholes in the law governing the CIO, including the gap in authority over supplementary investigations. The problem is that similar cases could arise in the future. In October, the prosecution service will be abolished and replaced by a new system consisting of two agencies: one under the justice minister, responsible for prosecutions, and the other under the interior and safety minister, responsible for investigating major crimes. The abolition of the prosecution service and the establishment of the indictment office represent a far more sweeping transformation of the criminal justice system than the creation of the CIO. Unless it is clearly settled whether prosecutors in the indictment office should have the authority to conduct supplementary investigations themselves, there is a strong possibility that situations similar to the handling of the Board of Audit and Inspection bribery case will recur. Hard-line lawmakers in the Democratic Party of Korea are strongly opposed to granting prosecutors in the indictment office the authority to conduct supplementary investigations. They argue that it is enough to give them only the authority to request supplementary investigations. But if the serious crimes investigation office or the police simply ignore or sit on those requests, that would be the end of it.