Why do government ministries stop keeping minutes while making policies?

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education Lee Ju-ho answers a question during a hearing held at the National Assembly on August 16. Reporter Park Min-gyu

Government ministries dealing with major issues such as the increase in the medical school admissions and dating violence are consistently found to be failing to keep proper minutes related to their policy decisions, increasing people’s distrust in the policy-making process. Each ministry is avoiding the law with the logic that "it is not a major meeting" or "a summary is also a meeting minutes."

According to a report on August 18, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, and the Ministry of Health and Welfare did not keep minutes of committees or task forces dealing with major policy issues, such as the increase in medical school admissions, or write minutes in a form that includes attendees' remarks.

The Ministry of Education has maintained its position since May that it has not left the minutes of the medical school quota allocation committee, which allocates medical school seats to universities for the next year. “We destroyed the (reference) materials of the medical school quota allocation committee meetings and there are no minutes,” said Oh Seok-hwan, Deputy Minister of Education, at a National Assembly hearing on August 16. ”Instead, there is data that organizes the results of each meeting into a report.”

Article 17 of the Public Records Management Act requires the preparation of minutes, stenographic records, or recordings of meetings in the course of promoting major policies or projects. The Ministry of Education is advocating the logic that the meetings of the quota allocation committee were "not major ones." It means that the Ministry of Health and Welfare set the size of the increase in medical school admissions, and the Ministry of Education’s quota allocation committee played a supporting role, not involving in a major policy decision. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education Lee Ju-ho said at the National Assembly, "The quota allocation committee is not a statutory body, but a voluntary body that advises the minister."

The quota allocation committee announced the completion of allocation of medical school quotas for 32 universities within five days after its first meeting on March 15. The meetings were held three times. On August 16, representatives of the medical community issued a press release and said they had filed a complaint with the police against Minister Lee and others on charges of violating the Public Records Management Act.

The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family has also been releasing only “reports on the result of meetings” instead of the meeting minutes of the Preventing Violence Against Women Committee chaired by the minister. The committee, which has as many as 28 members, covers all policies related to women, including women's violence prevention policies, system improvement, and business analysis.

Until this day, we requested the release of the minutes of the committee's meetings from 2020 to this year through a request for information disclosure, but the ministry only submitted reports on results of its meetings. Looking at the reports alone, it was impossible to understand what opinions each participant expressed and what discussions took place. The ministry’s reports only included only agendas for deliberation and key comments, such as the "need to supplement the legislative gap in the stalking blind spot" and "review to support sexual harassment and verbal sexual violence in cyberspace."

The ministry claimed that "It is also a meeting minutes that includes the date and time of a meeting, the number of participants, and major agendas," but this contradicts the "2024 Archives Management Guidelines" of the National Archives of Korea. The guidelines stipulate that the minutes should include the names of speakers for each agenda, the main content of their remarks, decisions, and the details of votes.

As of December last year, the Ministry of Health and Welfare operated 22 Task Forces but reported to the National Assembly that “there are no minutes of the meetings held by them.”

Critics point out that the government's poor preparation of minutes and non-disclosure practices increase people’s distrust in policy-making. The committees and task forces can easily become nothing more than a way to build procedural legitimacy. Critics also argue that this not only increases the opacity of the policy-making process but also reduces the responsibility of policymakers.

“The more the government sticks to the position that there are no minutes, the more it raises suspicions that the meetings were a formality,” said Jeon Jin-han, the head of the Right to Know Institute. ”Officials usually want to keep minutes for self-protection, but I'm worried that they are claiming the absence of minutes to reduce the responsibility of their superiors.”

※This article has undergone review by a professional translator after being translated by an AI translation tool.