SEOUL, May 20 (Yonhap) -- A dozen officials at two prestigious international schools in South Korea have been caught falsifying documents to grant admission to unqualified students, the municipal education office said Monday.

After a month-long special audit of Seoul's Younghoon International Middle School and Daewon International Middle School, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education ordered the schools to punish faculty members involved in admission corruption, while referring 11 officials to the prosecution.

The prosecution announced it launched an investigation on Younghoon based on the audit results and a petition filed in March by a coalition of liberal teachers' associations. Investigators said they recently completed questioning the people who submitted the petition.

According to the results of the audit, faculty members at Younghoon, including its vice principal and the head of the admission department, falsified admission test records by applicants for the academic year 2013 to grant enrollment to certain unqualified students.

While the school has two "special admission" categories for the underprivileged -- one reserved for low-income families and the other for non-financial reasons -- the fabrication mostly admitted those from the latter category regardless of their test results at the expense of otherwise qualified, yet poor applicants, the audit showed.

"The non-financial consideration admission is reserved for children from single-parent families, North Korean defectors, disabled children, among others, but this process is much easier to be misused compared to that for applicants from poor families," said an official of the education office.

The school was also found to have violated basic rules in grading the test papers of applicants by not following the blind grading system and scrapping the score cards in breach of its obligation to keep them on record for several years for reference.

In addition, the school abused its right to punish students by transferring them to other schools, and the chief of the school board illegally intervened in accounting matters.

Holding the chief accountable for the wrongdoings, the education office dismissed him and asked the school foundation to punish 10 other faculty members.

At Daewon school, three officials are to face disciplinary measures for granting admission to five unqualified students in 2010 by tampering with the admission process, according to education office. 

The education authorities also ordered the school to submit detailed information about scholarships for further investigation upon learning that it failed to award scholarships to students from low-income families as it had promised.

The special audit was conducted for about a month from March 8 in the wake of suspected money-for-admission cases by parents who were hoping to have their children attend one of the country's "schools of the elite."

The government established the special-purpose middle schools in 2009 to nurture global talent. But the two elite schools have been shrouded in controversy since their inception over expensive tuition and admission fraud.

Controversy ignited over the schools' admission process after the son of Lee Jae-yong, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics Co., was accepted to Younghoon last December under the non-financial special consideration category. Lee was divorced in 2009.

It is not known whether Lee's son was unqualified in terms of his test score.