Gov’t to cut 1% of civil servants annually

Jul 13, 2022, 09:30 am

AsiaToday reporter Park Ye-seul

The Yoon Suk-yeol administration will conduct an organizational diagnosis, including a full review of its manpower that increased significantly during the previous administration. It will inspect the operation status of all ministries, find sectors that are not being operated efficiently, and redeploy the manpower to improve the efficiency of the government workforce. Through this, the government plans to cut approximately 1 percent of civil servants every year.

The Ministry of the Interior and Safety said Tuesday that it reported the so-called “integrated government employee quota system” to the Cabinet meeting.

“Despite the recent declining population, regulatory reform, private sector growth, and such changes in the administrative environment, the number of civil servants has been growing. This has been a growing burden for the state coffer and caused inefficiency in administrative matters,” Vice Minister of Interior and Safety Han Chang-seob said in a press conference. “We will promote manpower efficiency in every field including the general public officials, the police, teachers, and local governments.”

The integrated quota system is a concrete implementation plan of the Yoon Suk-yeol government’s campaign for building a flexible and efficient government system, according to the ministry. The number of government workforce has steadily increased over the past two decades, from 978,000 during the Roh Moo-hyun government and 990,000 during the Lee Myung-bak government to 1.03 million during the Park Geun-hye government. The number increased to 1.16 million during the Moon Jae-in government.

The government plans to conduct a systematic and comprehensive examination to find whether the increased government manpower is being deployed in the right place to provide policies and services that the people want. It will inspect the operational status of each government agency’s functions and manpower through data-based organizational diagnosis for all ministries.

For this, self-diagnosis by ministries, joint public-private diagnosis, and in-depth diagnosis of large-scale manpower increase will be carried out in stages.

The results of the diagnosis will be used in the overall management of the government manpower, such as finding out outdated and overlapped administrative functions at the government agencies. The government will introduce the integrated quota system to slash 1 percent of the government workforce annually over the next five years to redeploy the extra employees to new administrative tasks.

The manpower quota system will be also applied to local government agencies nationwide to maintain the current level of government manpower.

#civil servants #Yoon Suk-yeol administration #manpower