The new mission of the ‘tax protector’ contained in the postman’s mail bag > News

The store demolition cost support project, which is the core of the Hopeful Return Package, is a valuable policy that provides support for restoration costs to small business owners who close due to financial difficulties and lays the foundation for their recovery. However, as the benefits increased, such as by raising the support limit to a maximum of 6 million won, moral hazard began to spread, trying to obtain support funds by manipulating documents without actually demolishing the property. So far, the government has been taking various preventive measures, such as operating an illegal supply and demand reporting center and introducing an abnormal transaction detection system (FDS). However, document screening alone had clear limitations in confirming the actual condition of the site, and even when private personnel were hired to conduct inspections, situations were repeatedly inefficient in terms of cost and time. The card chosen by the government to solve these structural problems was the post office delivery network, which is most closely related to our lives.

Due to the nature of their work, which involves detailed tours of the areas they are responsible for every day, postmen know more accurately than anyone else which stores are closed, are in the process of being demolished, or are already vacant. The move is to move away from the method in which private inspection personnel manually visited each site, and transform into a system where postal workers naturally cross-verify whether a business is closed while carrying out mail delivery duties. This is a very economical and effective approach in that it utilizes experts with a high understanding of the field without incurring the cost of hiring new personnel. In fact, through this collaboration, the cost of on-site inspection is expected to be significantly reduced from 10,000 won to 4,000 won per case, and the number of stores that can be inspected is also expected to increase more than five-fold, from 15 to 83 per day.

This project is not simply aimed at reducing costs. As the frequency and thoroughness of on-site checks increase, the effect of crime prevention can be maximized by putting psychological pressure on those seeking to illegally collect money. The Ministry of SMEs and Startups plans to first conduct a pilot project in the Chungcheong region for about two months from June to July to verify the accuracy of variables and data that may occur in the field. Based on the opinions and results collected during this period, a decision will be made in August on whether to expand implementation nationwide. This approach, which goes beyond simply implementing policies and gradually completes the system by reflecting voices from the field, is expected to greatly contribute to increasing the credibility of government policies.

Of course, there are some who are concerned about the workload of postal workers regarding these changes, but the government's position is that it will minimize work burden by designing an on-site verification system to a level that can be used in parallel with existing delivery work. In addition, the two organizations agreed to establish a data sharing system to confirm store demolition sites to simplify administrative procedures and continue to exchange information for transparent budget execution. This agreement goes beyond a simple business partnership between agencies and is likely to become an exemplary example of ‘administrative innovation’ that prevents leakage of the national budget by intelligently utilizing public infrastructure spread throughout the country. Attention is being paid to how effectively this attempt to ensure that the public's tax money is fully delivered to small business owners who really need it will fill the blind spots in the policy.