The Financial Supervisory Service will keep staffing for this year's finance and insurance scam response units at current levels and concentrate personnel on preparations for the special judicial police for livelihood finance crimes now being set up.
According to the financial authorities on the 15th, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), starting with personnel moves for employees at Head of Team level and below carried out the previous day, decided to add one position to the finance scam response unit and keep the insurance scam response unit's headcount unchanged. The headcount refers to the number of personnel allocated to a specific department and does not reflect factors such as vacancies. The finance scam response unit and the insurance scam response unit requested additional staffing, but it was not accepted.
Instead, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) is said to have decided to focus personnel on preparations for establishing the special judicial police for livelihood finance crimes. The special judicial police for livelihood finance crimes is to be set up to directly respond to voice phishing, insurance scams, and illegal private lending. Related work is handled exclusively by the Office for Coordinating Responses to Livelihood Infringements, which belongs to the livelihood finance sector along with the finance and insurance scam response units. Accordingly, most of the additional personnel for the livelihood finance sector recruited this time are expected to be assigned to the Office for Coordinating Responses to Livelihood Infringements.
As the special judicial police is expected to also take on responses to voice phishing and insurance scams, the finance scam response unit and the insurance scam response unit are interpreted to be operated at their existing size for now.
Personnel assigned to the Office for Coordinating Responses to Livelihood Infringements are expected to be deployed to set up a task force to prepare the scope of investigations and operating methods for the special judicial police. The staffing size of the task force for the special judicial police is also expected to be finalized soon.
The establishment of the FSS special judicial police is regarded within the FSS as a key task, as President Lee Jae-myung mentioned it directly. Lee Jae-myung, at a Financial Services Commission (FSC) work briefing held last month, instructed, "Is the FSS short on investigative personnel? Compile and report the issues, including the necessary scope of authority for the special judicial police, the scale for designating existing personnel, and the need to grant the authority to identify crimes."
An FSS official said, "For now, we are moving in the direction of concentrating our capabilities on the task force for the special judicial police for livelihood finance crimes."