There are many silly things in Korean government and politics — silly in the sense that follies and stupidities are being repeated although many know what the problems are. One such thing is the annual parliamentary audit of the executive and judiciary branches.
The National Assembly finished this year’s audit last week, and as had been expected, it lived up to its reputation as one of the most ridiculous institutions in the country.
For starters, you need to get only a few sets of statistics to understand how many problems the audit has. For instance, the 13 parliamentary committees audited a total of 708 government agencies and public organizations this year, compared with 671 last year.
This means most committees had to cover an average of more than five agencies a day. Three committees audited 20 or more agencies in a single day, with the Education-Culture Committee taking on as many as 25 agencies.
Added to this inefficiency is lawmakers’ abuse of its power to call people — including business tycoons and executives — to the witness stand. The number of people called to testify in parliamentary audits have been increasing steadily, with the figure reaching 289 this year.
Also noteworthy is that the proportion of business executives is growing rapidly, with their number standing at 130 or 44.9 percent of the total witnesses this year. You can easily guess why some lawmakers use their parliamentary privilege to bully the rich guys.
It is not unusual for the witnesses and officials to face insensible questions and rude comments from lawmakers. It is not rare either for those who were called to testify to sit out the entire session without getting the chance to make a single comment.
As usual, political issues that were not directly related to the audit often impeded its proceedings. For example, the opposition tried to use the auditing sessions to take issue with the drug scandal involving the son-in-law of the ruling party leader Kim Moo-sung, a potential presidential candidate.
Saenuri, in turn, tried to play up the controversy over the military draft exemption of Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon, another leading potential presidential candidate.
What makes one speechless is the attitude of some lawmakers. One ruling party lawmaker were caught by reporters reading a novel while her colleague was asking questions. A second lawmaker was working on his laptop for his own autobiography, and a third one watched television broadcast of a baduk (go) game in a nearby room while his committee was in session.
All in all, we cannot but raise the fundamental question: Do we have to keep ignoring all these stupidities and do nothing?
There have already been many suggestions to reform the parliamentary audit. Those that need to be heeded include calls for reducing the number of agencies that are subject to the audit and allowing parliamentary committees to invoke their auditing right all the year round, instead of limiting it to a certain period. These are the least to be done to free the audit from stupidities.
