The Financial Services Commission sharply reduced the penalty surcharge for Tongyang Life Insurance over a violation of the Credit Information Act. At the Financial Supervisory Service's disciplinary review stage, a penalty surcharge in the 140 billion won range was initially calculated, but the Financial Services Commission finalized the amount after considering the nature of the violation.
According to Yonhap on the 9th, the Financial Services Commission resolved at its regular meeting that day to impose a penalty surcharge of about 7 billion won on Tongyang Life Insurance.
Earlier, the Financial Supervisory Service detected in 2022 that Tongyang Life Insurance allegedly provided personal credit information to its corporate insurance agency (GA) subsidiary without customer consent and calculated a penalty surcharge in the 140 billion won range at the disciplinary review committee.
It is understood that the Financial Services Commission took into account that the recipient of the information was not a third party but a GA subsidiary. Accordingly, some matters were excluded from the penalty surcharge scope, and it also reflected that the scale of the information leak was not large compared with similar past cases.
The reason the Financial Supervisory Service calculated such a large penalty surcharge appears to be the penalty surcharge calculation structure under the Credit Information Act. The Credit Information Act bases the penalty surcharge on sales and has drawn criticism for limits in finely differentiating the penalty surcharge according to the degree of violation.
Financial authorities are reviewing measures to improve the penalty surcharge system under the Credit Information Act.