Lawmaker alleges 10 billion won in fraudulent long-term care claims at veterans welfare agency

Allegations of fraudulent long-term care benefit claims at the Korea Veterans Health Service have resurfaced.

Independent lawmaker Choi Hyeok-jin sharply criticized Korea Veterans Health Service President Yun Jong-jin on Wednesday after Yun submitted his resignation, saying what is needed now is not a resignation but a full uprooting of the fraudulent benefit structure and accountability for it.

Choi said he had newly confirmed evidence that some veterans care homes — including those in Suwon and Namyangju — had fraudulently claimed long-term care benefits over an extended period by falsely reporting cleaning staff as dedicated laundry sanitation workers, a mandatory staffing category.

"This false reporting and fraudulent benefit collection related to sanitation workers is not an isolated incident — it is confirmed to have continued for approximately 10 years," Choi said, adding that if the facts are fully verified, the total amount of fraudulently claimed benefits is estimated to reach about 10 billion won ($6.43 million).

Choi also defined the nature of the fraud in clear terms. If a public institution falsely reported mandatory staffing levels to the state and collected long-term care benefits on that basis, he said, "this is not a simple administrative error but a serious breach of duty — deceiving the state to misappropriate public funds."

Choi identified the collapse of the agency's internal controls as the root cause of the situation. The agency's failure to take any accountability measures or implement systemic reforms following earlier fraudulent benefit cases was "the most fundamental reason this harm grew as large as it did," he said, adding that covering up the earlier incidents allowed the fraud to continue on a larger scale and for a longer period.

He said this was made possible because the agency president had failed to responsibly set the organization right, and because the agency's audit office and internal control functions had been left in effective paralysis. "Unless the deeply entrenched subsidy embezzlement structure within the Korea Veterans Health Service and its broken oversight system are rooted out this time, the same problems will inevitably keep recurring in different forms," Choi said.

Choi also said the problems extend beyond fraudulent long-term care benefit claims. "The issue is not limited to fraudulent subsidy collection," he said, pointing to allegations of irregularities in hospital director appointments, illegal disbursement of veterans welfare project funds and employee embezzlement as evidence of repeated structural misconduct and management failures across the agency.

He went on to say that the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans cannot escape responsibility for its own failures in oversight and supervision, and urged the ministry to immediately launch a special audit and thorough investigation into the earlier subsidy embezzlement cases, the additional misconduct related to sanitation workers and the structural irregularities across the agency as a whole.