An administrative audit of the Gangwon Special Self-Governing Province Career Education Center was suspended Thursday after a heated exchange between a lawmaker and center officials.
The session ground to a halt as Lee Jong-seok, a People Power Party member of the Gangwon Provincial Assembly representing Yangyang, sharply challenged officials over what he called shoddy management of a 1.18 billion won ($880,000) project to build an AI career counseling and planning system.
Lee had been pressing officials over low budget execution rates and supplementary budget cuts when he confronted them over a direct contradiction between the written materials submitted to the assembly and the answers given by the center's director. Unable to respond, the center requested a recess, and the session was temporarily suspended.
The project spans three fiscal years — 145 million won in 2024, 675 million won in 2025 and 360 million won in 2026 — for a total of 1.18 billion won, aimed at building an AI-based system to support career counseling and planning for students.
According to Lee, despite the system being on track for an official launch in December, the budget execution rate stood at just 69.32 percent, placing it in the category of projects with execution rates below 70 percent. The center ultimately applied for an 80 million won reduction through a supplementary budget, Lee said, pointing to what he described as reckless budgeting and poor execution.
"Even though this is a single continuous project, the project overview and stated purpose were written differently each year in 2024, 2025 and 2026," Lee said. "Isn't this a case of rushing to draw up and spend a budget without even clearly establishing the basic concept or purpose of the project?"
Lee also took aim at the conflicting accounts between the submitted documents and the center director's oral responses at the audit. The written materials cited delays in procurement due to compliance procedures — including a prior review by the Ministry of Interior and Safety for information technology projects — as the reason for the low execution rate. The center director, however, said the funds had not been spent because the center had decided to return them through the supplementary budget. The contradiction sharpened the atmosphere at the audit and led to the intense questioning that ultimately forced the recess.
"An advanced AI project drawing on 1.2 billion won of taxpayers' money has been wavering in direction from the very start, with its budget both inflated and poorly spent," Lee said. Lee urged the provincial education office and the Career Education Center to apologize for submitting inaccurate audit materials and to conduct a thorough review of the entire AI career counseling system project, along with establishing standardized project management measures.
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