NEC special prosecutor raids election commission over allowance payments, citing treasury losses

The special prosecutor investigating the National Election Commission — appointed to look into misconduct allegations including a ballot shortage during the June 3 local elections — has launched a forced investigation into allowances paid monthly to non-standing commissioners, including the chairperson.

The special prosecutor's team said it executed search and seizure warrants Monday morning, beginning around 9 a.m., across 18 departments at the National Election Commission headquarters in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province — including the chairperson's office and the secretary general's office — on charges of violating the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Crimes (treasury loss), abuse of authority and falsification of official documents.

The team also executed a warrant at the residence of a former NEC secretary general, identified only by the surname A, on charges of abuse of authority and treasury loss. According to the team, A is suspected of issuing unlawful and improper instructions to pay the allowances to non-standing commissioners in 2024 and last year.

A total of 65 personnel were deployed to execute the warrants, including four seconded prosecutors — one of them a senior prosecutor — and 25 forensic investigators. The team is investigating allegations of mismanagement in the overall operation of the NEC and job-related misconduct by current and former commissioners and staff.

The team said it found evidence that the NEC had received warnings from the Board of Audit and Inspection and the National Assembly that there was no legal basis for the allowance payments, yet submitted budget documents for 2019 through 2022 with the notation "not applicable" in the section for external agency findings — a false entry — and then secured and disbursed the budget anyway.

The team also found evidence that in 2024, no budget was allocated for the allowances at all, and that last year the entire budget line was cut — yet payments were made using funds designated for other purposes. According to the team, annual payments totaled about 171.5 million won ($128,000) in 2020, about 210.92 million won in 2021, about 200.28 million won in 2022, 215.4 million won in 2024, and 107.7 million won in the third and fourth quarters of last year — amounting to 905.8 million won in total.

Payments were suspended in 2023. The team said each year's disbursement met the threshold of 100 million won or more in treasury losses required to constitute an offense under the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Crimes.

Earlier, the anti-corruption and financial crime unit of the Gyeonggi Southern Police Agency had referred NEC employees to the Suwon District Prosecutors' Office on charges of falsifying and using official documents and obstructing the execution of official duties, after the employees ignored audit findings and fabricated records. A joint police-prosecution task force formed after the local elections took over the case, and the special prosecutor's team subsequently intensified the investigation.

The team said it had applied for search and seizure warrants targeting the NEC and related parties on Oct. 12 over the same allegations, but a court rejected the application, citing three reasons: the basic facts were already established, the suspects appeared to hold a different legal interpretation of those facts, and the search posed a significant risk of disrupting normal NEC operations. The team had said it would reapply for the warrants and press ahead with the investigation.

The team plans to analyze the seized materials to determine how the allowance budget was drawn up and spent, and to trace the chain of instructions and reporting involved. The team said it will focus in particular on why the unlawful payments continued, were halted and then resumed — noting that rank-and-file secretariat staff were not among the beneficiaries and had long been aware the practice was illegal — in order to establish the degree of involvement and culpability of the most senior officials.