Gangbuk-gu moves to prevent administrative errors before they happen

Gangbuk-gu in Seoul is strengthening its internal audit program with a focus on prevention, aiming to improve accountability and public trust in district administration. The district is encouraging staff to make greater use of an audit case search system and is shifting its comprehensive audits from a department-by-department approach to a bureau-level structure to reduce gaps in oversight.

The audit case search system, in operation since 2018, allows employees to look up past audit findings and apply them to their current work. It covers five categories — budgeting and accounting, construction, community administration, outsourcing and subsidies, and miscellaneous — enabling staff to check for issues similar to those previously flagged and avoid repeating the same errors.

The district's internal audit efforts center on identifying and addressing potential problems before they escalate. Findings from audits are reviewed comprehensively, taking into account their nature and root causes, and corrective or improvement measures are applied as needed. Relevant cases are then shared with staff so that audit outcomes translate into concrete improvements in day-to-day operations.

Starting this year, the district has also moved its comprehensive audits from individual department units to the bureau level. The change is designed to close oversight gaps that can arise under a department-by-department model and to manage audit targets and schedules more systematically, ensuring the mandated three-year audit cycle is consistently met.

"Internal audit activity matters more as a way to identify and fix potential problems during the work process than as a means of pointing out mistakes after the fact," Gangbuk-gu District Mayor Jeong Chang-su said. "We will continue to strengthen preventive audit practices to raise the accountability and trustworthiness of district administration."