Lawmakers on Tuesday resumed reviewing the draft of an anticorruption bill that has been stalled in the parliament since May due to a series of summer elections and ongoing partisan strife over other pieces of legislation.
The so-called Kim Young-ran bill aims to end influence peddling in officialdom by making it a crime to receive any kind of unofficial monetary payment. It was first proposed in 2011 by the then-head of the Anti-Corruption & Civil Rights Commission, after which the bill is named.
But the bill was last debated in May, before the June local elections, the July by-elections and partisan wrangling over other bills swept public attention away. Lawmakers said after Tuesday’s meeting they hoped to pass the KYR bill by year-end.
Public support for the bill has always been high, but its popularity rose in the weeks following the Sewol ferry disaster in April, when cronyism among marine safety regulators was cited as one of the accident’s key causes.
The bill has also been favored by President Park Geun-hye and the country’s two main parties, which together hold 288 of the 300 seats in the legislature.
Disagreements over key details of the bill, however, have prolonged parliamentary debate on the legislation.
Lawmakers are unsure whether only public officials should be considered subject to the bill’s restrictions, which critics say are too stringent. They say that according to the original draft of the bill, innocent gestures of kindness can also be subject to the anticorruption bill.
The son of a public official can be penalized, for example, if he receives a television set worth more than 1 million won ($904) as a Christmas present, as he is a family member of an incumbent bureaucrat.
The gift to the son of a public official could be considered influence peddling, the supporters of the bill’s original draft say, if the gift-giver is an industry official who regularly receives audits from the father.
“If we include the families of civil servants in the bill’s area of subjectivity, as many as 15 million people could be included,” governing Saenuri Party Rep. Kim Yong-tae, a lawmaker sitting on the Assembly’s committee on national policy, said.
South Korea’s population is estimated at 51.3 million according to the government.
“We will try to be as specific as possible in the bill’s wording to minimize any subjective interpretation of the anticorruption law,” Rep. Kim added, saying that precision would be the goal.
South Korea’s trust in public officials is traditionally low as corruption has been embarrassingly high in Asia’s fourth-largest economy. An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report in October ranked South Korea’s public confidence in its national government 22nd, among 25 surveyed Asian nations. Another report by the international body in September cited statistics that put South Korea 14th among 18 OECD member countries in terms of resistance to corruption.
