[Anchor]

Following our series of reports two months ago on the problems within forest restoration projects, the government launched a large-scale investigation. A massive number of problematic companies have been caught.

Reporter Noh Yujin has the story.

[Reporter]

[SBS 8 News, May 4: There were forestry corporations that only sought out wildfire sites across the country, established ghost companies to win project contracts, and then disappeared.]

Following the report, the Korea Forest Service and the Corruption Prevention Promotion Team under the Office for Government Policy Coordination conducted a comprehensive investigation into 1,901 forestry business entities nationwide.

Excluding companies that had already closed or had unclear locations, they investigated approximately 1,400 firms, and illegal activities were confirmed or suspected in a staggering 900 of them.

This means problems were found in two out of every three companies investigated.

[President Lee Jae-myung (Yesterday, Cabinet Meeting): They conducted an investigation and it seems about 900 of them have issues, something like that. Korea Forest Service? (Yes, that is data from the Korea Forest Service. That is correct.) It is an absurd situation. Why haven't the Korea Forest Service and the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs known about this until now?]

The methods used by those caught were essentially a form of deception.

Circumstances were uncovered where companies hired employees who lived too far away to commute, or paid abnormally low wages to individuals just to borrow their names.

Technicians were even caught registered as employees at four different corporations with different locations simultaneously.

[Industry Insider: Go visit these companies. They are almost all paper companies.]

The Korea Forest Service has initially requested investigations into 78 companies and 165 technicians for illegally lending technical certifications or violating dual employment regulations, and has begun administrative procedures such as license revocation.

This stands in stark contrast to last year, when they investigated over 2,700 companies but failed to uncover a single case of illegal certification lending, claiming that transactions were too secretive.

The Korea Forest Service stated that it will continue joint investigations with local governments until the end of next month to root out structural corruption in wildfire restoration projects.

(Video reporting: Kim Seung-tae, Video editing: Kim Jong-tae)