Nearly 70 percent of ordinary Korean citizens regard society here as corrupt, with the largest number of them citing politicians as the main culprits, a poll showed Friday.

According to the survey of 1,400 ordinary citizens, 1,400 civil servants, 700 business executives and 630 opinion leaders, 65.4 percent of the general public said society is corrupt as a whole.

The number was a large jump from 51.6 percent holding the view a year earlier.

While the corrupt image of the society was shared by nearly half of the opinion leaders, 26.7 percent of the business persons and 15.1 percent of the government officials surveyed saw society as corrupt, the survey conducted by the Anti-corruption & Civil Rights Commission showed.

The share of ordinary citizens regarding civil servants as corrupt rose to 56.7 percent from 54.1 percent last year, which is in stark contrast to 2.9 percent of the surveyed civil servants, the survey found.

More than half of the country‘s ordinary citizens considered politicians the main culprits behind the corruption in the nation, followed by government agencies (30.3 percent), the judiciary sector (25.4 percent) and state-owned companies (22.5 percent), according to the poll.

While more than half of the ordinary citizens assessed the government’s anti-corruption efforts as insufficient, the share of the respondents who expect things to get worse reached 27.3 percent, up from 17 percent last year, it found.

To eradicate such irregularities, 36.5 percent of ordinary citizens, the largest number, called for heavier punishments, while the largest number of public officials said administrative restrictions that could cause corruption should be revised, the survey found.

“To root out corruption of public servants, particularly high-ranking officials, we will devise relevant rules and programs to raise awareness about the value of integrity in the society,” the anti-corruption commission said. (Yonhap News)