I heard it was 100 million won... “HUG ‘Real Estate Finance’ service, stitching together existing works”

(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Ahn Jung-hoon = Representative Ahn Tae-jun of the Democratic Party of Korea announced on the 15th that the research service conducted by the Housing and Urban Guarantee Corporation (HUG) for 100 million won through a private contract in 2023 is at the level of a revision of an existing work.

Rep. Ahn, a member of the National Assembly's Land, Infrastructure and Transport Committee, made this statement based on data submitted by HUG that day.

According to the data, the only external service conducted by HUG between 2022 and 2026 was a research service on 'Korean real estate finance' in 2023. The contract amount of the main contract, which was executed as a private contract, is 99.7 million won.

Rep. Ahn said that this research project has the same title as the edited book published in 2008 by editor Professor Son Jae-young, and the composition of the research team and table of contents are largely similar. However, because this book was not in a database, it was excluded from the similarity verification.

Professor Son later published a completely revised version of the 2008 book in 2012, which was also excluded from the similarity verification.

According to HUG's internal guidelines, researchers must conduct a similarity test and submit their research results.

Separately, project staff within HUG are supposed to check redundancy and research ethics at the researcher selection stage and the research results evaluation stage, but it was revealed that even this was not carried out.

Rep. Ahn said, “If the result of the research service is a completely revised version of an existing work, we cannot help but ask whether HUG is a research institute or a publishing company.” He added, “It must be clearly revealed why a public enterprise had to invest public money to revise a specific researcher’s existing work.”