The Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) announced that it will reflect public opinions in establishing next year's audit plan and hold an idea contest for next month.

This marks the first time the BAI is receiving suggestions for formulating its audit plan through an online public contest.

The BAI announced today (September 30) that any South Korean citizen aged 19 or older can participate.

Participants can submit target organizations, major issues, and points requiring verification centered on audit areas such as fields closely related to daily life, safety, and life, responses to future risk factors, and concerns regarding large-scale budget waste or administrative inefficiency, through pop-up windows on the BAI website.

The submitted suggestions will be reviewed and utilized in formulating next year's audit plan, and proposals that are difficult to reflect immediately will be managed as future monitoring tasks.

The BAI will also select outstanding proposals and award prize money of up to 2 million won.

The BAI explained, "While we have endeavored to improve illegal and unfair business practices in the public sector and resolve situations infringing on the rights and interests of the people by receiving audit requests and reports from citizens, there were limitations in preemptively capturing the problems that citizens experience in their actual daily lives."

It further explained, "We have introduced an online contest format to discover inconvenience and risk factors closely related to daily life or unreasonable administrative practices felt in the administrative field, and to broadly reflect the public's demand for policy improvement in our audit plan."

However, the BAI noted that this contest is intended to discover audit ideas related to institutional improvements or structural issues, and that those requesting audits regarding specific illegal or improper acts by particular public officials or organizations must use the existing audit request and reporting systems.

(Photo provided by the Board of Audit and Inspection, Yonhap News)