A government inspection has identified 4,716 forestry technicians suspected of legal violations, including cases in which firms used the licenses of technicians who had already died. Investigators also found that forestry projects were routinely awarded through no-bid contracts — about 83% of total contract value — despite rules requiring competitive bidding, a practice flagged as a cause of declining quality in forestry work.
The Government Joint Anti-Corruption Task Force under the Office for Government Policy Coordination and the Korea Forest Service announced the results on the 16th of a joint inspection covering 1,907 forestry corporations and 12,463 forestry technicians. The inspection found 181 companies that failed to meet requirements for office space and capital, along with 4,716 technicians suspected of violations such as lending out their licenses or holding dual employment, and 1,010 corporations that had hired them. In particular, 33 corporations were found to have used the licenses of 38 forestry technicians who had already died.
The government said it will punish without exception all violations by corporations and technicians uncovered during the inspection. Corporations failing to meet registration requirements and technicians suspected of violations will all face administrative action following hearings, while cases involving serious violations, those requiring close investigation, or those where disposition procedures can proceed quickly will be referred to prosecutors first. Criminal referrals have already been completed for some, including 342 forestry project corporations and 401 forestry technicians. The government also plans to toughen penalties for illegal practices such as license lending and failure to meet registration requirements, and to upgrade its management system to screen for violations including license lending and dual employment at the registration stage.
Separately, although national and local contract laws require competitive bidding as a principle, an analysis of major forestry projects from 2023 to 2025 showed that no-bid contracts accounted for about 83% of contract value, an unusually high share. No-bid contracts are not illegal, but they limit market competition and allow firms to win work without screening for qualifications, which officials cite as a cause of declining quality in forestry projects.
An analysis of forestry project bids on the KONEPS public procurement system from January 2023 through September identified about 120 corporations suspected of so-called swarm bidding. Most of those cases involved no-bid contracts for small-scale orders. Swarm bidding refers to the practice in which multiple corporations suspected of having the same actual operator — set up under the names of family members or acquaintances, listing the same person as chief executive, director or auditor, or sharing the same address and phone number — participate in the same tender simultaneously.
To prevent projects from being split into smaller pieces to justify unnecessary no-bid contracts, the government plans to strengthen its guidelines on forestry project subsidies, reflecting appropriate project sizes for contracting agencies from the budget-drafting stage and creating a prior review process for no-bid contracts. It will also narrow the excessively broad definitions of project scope in no-bid contracts awarded through proxy or delegated arrangements, so that such contracts are used only when necessary. The corporations suspected of swarm bidding will be referred to prosecutors for obstruction of bidding, such as unqualified firms winning contracts, after further verification, and the government will conduct periodic monitoring of swarm bidding.
The inspection ran for about five months from May through recent weeks as the first task of the government's national normalization project, aimed at establishing sound market order among forestry project corporations. Forestry projects are works intended to maintain, develop or restore forest functions, including afforestation, forest tending, use and disaster prevention. The government spends an average of about 1.2 trillion won ($820 million) a year on projects such as afforestation, forest tending, forest roads and erosion control.