▲ A view of the Gwangju Seo-gu District Office
Employees at the Gwangju Seo-gu District Office have been caught manipulating the vehicle registration system to provide highly sought-after "golden" license plate numbers to specific businesses.
According to the Gwangju Seo-gu District on Wednesday (June 17), an audit conducted from February 9 through May on 16 employees in the Traffic Administration Division's vehicle registration team confirmed that some staff members had illicitly secured and provided specific numbers.
It was revealed that they secured these numbers by arbitrarily registering "golden" numbers—such as "5555" or "1004"—to civilian vehicles, only to later cancel or correct the registrations to reclaim the numbers.
In principle, vehicle registration numbers must be selected from a list of 10 randomly generated options.
However, investigations showed that some employees, acting on requests from certain businesses, assigned pre-secured specific numbers to 346 vehicles over the past three years.
For example, after registering a number like "7777" to a general vehicle, they would immediately cancel the registration and designate it as "reserved," preventing that number from appearing in the random selection pool for subsequent vehicle registrations.
The employees would then manually assign that number to a vehicle requested by a business, bypassing the random selection process.
This practice was carried out habitually at the request of vehicle registration agencies and was even passed down during the handover process between predecessors and successors.
It was also found that some employees received meals as favors from these registration agencies.
The Seo-gu District Office launched an investigation after a citizen raised suspicions through the e-People (Gungmin Singungo) portal this past February.
Based on the investigation results, the district plans to request that the Gwangju City Personnel Committee impose heavy disciplinary action on three employees—one Grade 8 and two Grade 9 officials—and light disciplinary action on three other Grade 8 officials.
Considering the frequency and duration of the violations, four additional employees will receive warnings or reprimands.
Furthermore, the district intends to refer 14 employees, including those facing disciplinary action and four contract workers, to the police for investigation on charges including violations of the Motor Vehicle Management Act.
(Photo: Yonhap News/Provided by Gwangju Seo-gu)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.