– ACRC actively coordinated to reach agreement on a petition regarding road-damage compensation filed through the Citizen’s Active Administration Application system on July 14

– When delayed due to unclear responsibility for petition handling, inter-agency coordination will immediately begin

The Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission (ACRC, Chairperson Jung Il-yeon) drew agreement on complex civil petitions that were filed through its “Citizen’s Active Administration Application” , which had stalled because multiple administrative agencies were involved, by actively coordinating among the agencies.

* Citizen’s Active Administration Application System: A system through which a petitioner may ask the head of the competent administrative agency to actively handle a matter by making use of active-administration support mechanisms (such as review by an audit institution). The ACRC reviews such requests and puts forward recommendations for improvement of the current situation to the competent agency. Applications can be filed through the e-People portal or the ACRC website.

The first resolved petition was filed by a driver whose vehicle wheel was damaged by a traffic delineator on a road near Gwacheon Citizens’ Plaza in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province.

When damage is caused by a facility belong to the government while driving, compensation should be provided by the central or local government concerned. In this case, however, responsibility for managing the road was unclear between the Government Employees Pension Service (GEPS), which owns the road, and the Gwacheon Government Complex Management Office and the City of Gwacheon, which occupy and use it. As a result, disputes over the responsibility arose five times, and processing of the petitioner’s compensation claim was delayed for an extended period.

Judging that the public should no longer have to bear the burden of inconvenience caused by disagreements between public institutions, the ACRC actively coordinated the case with officials from the relevant agencies. After extensive discussion, the City of Gwacheon and the Gwacheon Government Complex Management Office agreed to lay proceed with compensation procedures.

The second case resolved through the Citizen’s Active Administration Application concerned property damage suffered by residents nearby the railway land along the Gyeongui Line in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, due to trees left around the land. Large acacia trees near the railway land caused fences to collapse and damaged the walls of private property, requiring urgent action. Action was delayed because the relevant regulations on the scope and authority of railway facility maintenance were unclear.

The ACRC confirmed the background of the petition and coordinated actively, by requesting cooperation from the relevant agencies. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, the Korea Railroad Corporation, and the National Railway Administration convened an emergency meeting and agreed to remove the trees by August of this year and to revise the Landscaping Facility Management Guidelines to clearly define the scope of tree management in the next maintenance and management contract.

With these cases, the ACRC has decided to devise measures for swift handling of civil petitions— such as immediate inter-agency coordination whenever petition processing is delayed due to the unclear division of responsibility among the relevant agencies.

Secretary General of the ACRC Han Samsuk stated, “Close communication and cooperation are significantly important for petitions involving multiple administrative agencies.” He added, “The ACRC will continue to faithfully fulfill its role as the ‘control tower for active administration,’ resolving problems from the public’s perspective by dismantling the silos between institutions through active coordination.”