An analysis has emerged that Gyeonggi Province, facing financial difficulties, has an estimated 2.4207 trillion won across 71 projects suspected of being underfunded in this year's budget.

The Gyeonggi Fiscal Innovation TF held a press conference on the 12th and announced the results of its analysis on expenditure restructuring tasks containing these findings.

Jo Im-gon, co-chair of the TF (professor of public administration at Kyonggi University), stated, "When calculating the amounts inadequately budgeted this year compared to last year, it amounted to approximately 2.4 trillion won," adding, "There are projects whose budgets were cut, as well as projects with reduced budget allocations when considering the growth rate for three consecutive years."

Previously, it was confirmed that Gyeonggi Province failed to allocate 313.2 billion won for essential public livelihood projects in this year's main budget due to the burden of repaying local bonds and internal transactions.

This includes three months' worth of funding from October to December for areas such as long-term care for the elderly (123.4 billion won), school meal expenses for kindergarten, elementary, middle, and high schools under the provincial office of education (58.4 billion won), operation of the public management system for city buses (29.1 billion won), and postpartum care subsidies (8.0 billion won).

This means that apart from essential public livelihood projects, various underfunded project expenses exceed 2 trillion won.

The Fiscal Innovation TF pointed out, "The core is an expenditure structure that does not create recurring deficits rather than just the amount cut," and added, "Decisions on maintaining, reducing, or consolidating project expenses must be made based on necessity, performance, execution, and contracts."

(Photo provided by Gyeonggi Province, Yonhap News)