More than six in ten of the South Korean forestry firms inspected in a nationwide anti-corruption sweep are suspected of lending technician licences, running shell companies, or failing to meet basic registration requirements, with 900 operators flagged across 1,412 site visits. That is according to the Korea Forest Service and the Government Joint Anti-Corruption Task Force, which announced interim results on Wednesday and referred 78 firms and 165 technicians for investigation in a first wave of enforcement.
Investigators moved first against 30 companies and 126 technicians accused of breaching the Forestry Technology Act’s ban on licence lending, alongside 39 technicians across 48 firms who held prohibited second jobs. Sanctions now in train include revoked technician qualifications and cancelled corporate registrations, penalties the forest agency says will force substandard operators out of the market.
“We will pursue to the end,” a task force official said of the campaign, pledging to root out any group or act seeking unfair and illegal profits from forestry firms and every other government project.
Registered with provincial and city governments to carry out forest tending and afforestation, the 1,901 firms on the national books compete for publicly funded work, and the Kyunghyang Shinmun reports suspect cases surfaced at more than 60 per cent of those inspected. Another 489 companies missed the first round entirely, having closed, moved, or been absent when inspectors called, and joint teams with local governments will pursue them through the end of August.
Among the referred cases, the representative of a company in Boeun, North Chungcheong Province, helped 11 associates obtain forestry technician certifications, borrowed the credentials back, and listed the group as employees to keep the firm’s registration alive. Investigation, referral, and revocation of the technicians’ qualifications followed.
A second referral names an intermediate forestry management technician who worked for a company in Uiseong, North Gyeongsang Province, while registered as full-time staff at three more firms in Hadong, Goseong, and Gumi, with a Gimhae company representative separately caught doubling as site agent on an afforestation contract won by another operator. Beyond straightforward lending, investigators found abnormally low salaries, technicians registered as full-time workers from distant homes, and employment contracts so thin that any real work was in doubt.
Wood Central understands Uiseong sits at the centre of the ground burnt in the March 2025 fires, the largest in Korea’s recorded history, which killed 32 people and scarred 104,000 hectares across North and South Gyeongsang and Ulsan. The crackdown reaches the contractor base carrying that replanting workload, four months after Commissioner Park Eun-sik pledged to rewrite forestry rules for 2.2 million forest owners and 200,000 foresters, and first-phase field checks extended to post-fire recovery planting, the firms had already delivered.
“Firms that have continued illegal and substandard practices will face a stern response,” Park said in May, launching a normalisation task force under his own chairmanship after so-called grasshopper firms, operators hopping between provinces chasing contracts, drew complaints of paper companies and shoddy work.
Evasion has already begun, with some operators cancelling their corporate registration and re-registering under a new name to slip the net. Local governments will now verify the four major social insurances, employment contracts, and duplicate technician registrations before approving any new forestry firm, while employment-insurance records from the Ministry of Employment and Labor are added to the hunt for paper technicians.
By the Korea Forest Service’s own count, 78 firms and 165 technicians now sit before investigators, 900 of 1,901 registered operators have suspect files, and the joint teams have until the end of August to reach the 489 companies that were not home when the knock came.
