Reform Party calls on Jeong Won-oh to resign over alleged hiring irregularities tied to Cancun trip

By Kim Do-yoon, The Herald Business

Reform Party Seoul mayoral candidate Kim Jeong-cheol on Sunday called for the resignation of Democratic Party of Korea Seoul mayoral candidate Jeong Won-oh, alleging that Jeong omitted required job postings when fast-tracking the promotion of an employee who accompanied him on a Cancun business trip during his tenure as Seongdong-gu district chief.

Kim and Reform Party floor leader Cheon Ha-ram held a press conference at the National Assembly's media room, saying they wanted to "highlight the administrative opacity surrounding the suspiciously rapid promotion of Employee A, who accompanied candidate Jeong on his Cancun business trip when he was Seongdong-gu district chief." They claimed no verifiable digital job posting exists on either the Ministry of Personnel Management's NaraIlter site — where all public-sector job postings in South Korea are aggregated — or on the Seongdong-gu district office's own website.

The "Cancun business trip allegations," which opposition figures have consistently raised, center on whether Employee A of Seongdong-gu — who accompanied Jeong on the trip — received preferential treatment. Employee A was hired in 2021 as a fixed-term Grade Da civil servant in the youth policy field, then promoted to Grade Na district planning specialist in 2024 and to Grade Ga in 2025.

The Reform Party cited three grounds for questioning the integrity of the hiring process: the job postings and final successful-candidate announcements for Employee A's Grade Na and Grade Ga appointments cannot be found on either the Seongdong-gu website or NaraIlter; no record of the relevant postings exists on Seoul's Open Data Plaza; and the job posting documents Seongdong-gu submitted to the National Assembly contain no posting number and list an incorrect year for the examination schedule.

Kim said the Seoul Open Data Plaza "was created under then-Mayor Park Won-soon and automatically collects and archives public data posted on every autonomous district website in Seoul." He argued that of 4,844 Seongdong-gu job postings recorded since 2014, only the two postings for Employee A are missing. "If they had been posted, they would have to be there — their absence means they were never uploaded in the first place, not that they were deleted," he said.

He added that neither the posting dates nor the successful-candidate announcement dates for Employee A's Grade Na and Grade Ga appointments left any trace in the data, and that "there is no objective evidence anywhere in South Korea's digital networks that Seongdong-gu properly posted these two notices."

Kim also said the job posting documents submitted to the National Assembly "have a blank posting number, and the examination schedule is listed as 2022 rather than 2024," raising suspicion that "when the Assembly and the press demanded the documents, someone hastily cobbled together old postings."

Kim demanded that Jeong and Seongdong-gu immediately disclose the full posting history and log records from their digital systems, specifying when, on which channel, and under what posting number and URL each notice was published.

The Reform Party said that if the allegations prove true, "this constitutes a serious hiring fraud that undermines fairness and common sense," and announced plans to file a criminal complaint with investigative authorities immediately to ensure the relevant digital data and administrative documents are not destroyed.