The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) has decided to increase this year's budget for the investigation of illegal private finance from 150 million won to 226 million won and to double the sample size. The FSS has conducted annual investigations into illegal private finance since 2018 (the 2017 survey), but it has not disclosed the results since 2019, citing a decrease in the accuracy of the results. As the budget and frequency have increased this year, it remains to be seen whether the results will be made public.
According to the financial authorities on the 28th, the FSS has begun selecting research institutions for the 2024 investigation of illegal private finance. Excluding 2019, the budget for investigating illegal private finance has been set annually at 140 million to 150 million won, but this year it has increased to 226 million won. The goal is to expand the sample size to 10,000, double the usual 5,000.
This investigation was established as a measure to supplement the reduction of the legal maximum interest rate in 2018 (from 27.9% to 24.0%) and has been conducted annually. It investigates the scope of the illegal private finance market and user characteristics and usage methods on a one-to-one basis.
The FSS publicly disclosed the results of the illegal private finance survey for the previous year twice, in 2018 and 2019. Since then, it has not disclosed the results of the investigation, citing "the need for verification due to decreased accuracy." There have been constant requests for data disclosure from the National Assembly and related organizations, but the FSS has only released estimations of the scale of illegal private finance usage and the number of users. As a result, there has been significant criticism regarding the nondisclosure of survey results, for which hundreds of millions of won were spent.
The government, including financial authorities, the National Tax Service, the Supreme Public Prosecutors' Office, and the Korean National Police Agency, is operating an "anti-illegal private finance intergovernmental task force (TF)," and this investigation is the only government survey data related to illegal private finance.
Experts point out that objective investigation results must be disclosed to be used in illegal private finance policies. Lee Su-jin, a senior researcher at the Korea Financial Research Institute, noted, "The analysis conducted on users of illegal private finance so far can be said to be the investigation into the illegal private finance market conducted by the FSS as a sample survey, but even that is limited since the 2018 results were the last data disclosed. The FSS plans to discuss the public release of this year's survey data with the National Statistical Office.