In September, with Chuseok around the corner, the circles on the office calendar multiply. 🍂
I am an administrative agent with an office in Songdo, Yeonsu-gu, Incheon. Let me share one story I came across in my work.
The reason the circles multiply at this time of year is simple. Work that has to be finished before the holiday, work that gets pushed back by the holiday, and work whose deadline becomes confusing because the holiday falls in the middle all arrive at once. Government offices may close, but dates set by law do not take a holiday. Filing periods, correction periods and submission deadlines sit in between the red days on the calendar. That September, the boldest circle on my calendar was one civil servant's "30 days."
Those 30 days were already about half gone. And the date was not the only problem. He was confused about whether he had been wronged or whether he had done something wrong. That confusion was, in fact, the heart of this case.
A long email at 11 p.m.
On Tuesday night that week, a long email arrived in the office inbox. It was sent at 11:40 p.m. The sender was a civil servant in his early thirties working at a national agency in Incheon.
Two photos were attached. One was the "statement of reasons for disciplinary action," the other a summary of the disciplinary committee's resolution. The penalty: a one-month pay cut. The reason: "engaging in for-profit work without permission for concurrent employment."
Here was his story. For several years he had gone camping on weekends and uploaded short videos: how to pitch a tent, how to dry firewood on a rainy day, small things like that. At first the channel had only a few dozen subscribers, but one winter a video titled "Preparing for solo winter camping" was picked up by the algorithm, subscribers grew, and the channel eventually crossed the threshold for monetization.
When a civil servant earns income from a personal internet channel, he must obtain permission for concurrent employment from the head of his agency. The State Public Officials Act restricts public officials from engaging in for-profit work or holding other duties without the permission of the head of their agency, and under the service guidelines of the Ministry of Personnel Management, personal internet broadcasting also requires permission once it crosses the income threshold.
He knew this. So, he said, he had applied for permission. "I definitely applied. But they say there is no record." The email ended with that sentence.
Before we met, my review was already half done. The first thing I checked was not how unfair it felt, but the date. He had received the statement of reasons on August 26. Article 76(1) of the State Public Officials Act provides that a public official who has received a statement of reasons for disciplinary action and wishes to contest it must file a request for review with the Appeals Commission within 30 days from the date of receiving the statement. Put simply, once those 30 days pass, you cannot get a review at all, however unfair the matter may be.
The period is counted from the day after receipt. If the last day falls on a holiday it is extended to the next day, but there was no reason to rely on that and relax. The entire Chuseok holiday fell in between. If a task requires asking a government office for something and getting an answer, a holiday simply becomes a blank.
I replied: "Let's meet on Thursday at 2 p.m. Please bring the documents about the disciplinary action in their original form, and write down everything you remember from around the time you say you applied for concurrent employment."
What he had already tried on his own
On Thursday afternoon he arrived right on time. 🙂 His documents were filed in date order in a clear folder. You could tell from the folder alone that he was a conscientious person. But this time, that conscientiousness seemed to have worked against him.
He had already done everything he could. In spring, when a service inspection confirmed income from his channel, he immediately submitted a written explanation. At the disciplinary committee, too, he stated that he "had submitted the application and even had it confirmed by the person in charge." But the committee did not accept this, saying there was no material confirming the application. His name was not in the agency's register of concurrent-employment permissions.
Why would his name be missing from the register if he had applied? He explained it like this. He had applied two winters ago, when he was in his previous department. He filled in the form and uploaded it through the internal electronic document system, then told the service officer in charge at the time via messenger, "I've uploaded it." The reply was, "OK, I'll check and process it." Two weeks later came the regular personnel reshuffle. Both he and that officer moved to other departments.
"Did you receive notice that permission was granted?" I asked.
He was silent for a moment. "No. But I never heard it was rejected either. So I assumed it had gone through."
Only after hearing that answer did the shape of the case start to become clear. He was not lying. At the same time, the disciplinary committee was not wrong either. There really was a period in which he earned income without permission. Permission takes effect only when it is granted, not when it is applied for. That part could not be contested.
The problem lay elsewhere.
In whose name is the appeal filed?
He asked cautiously, "Could you possibly appear before the Appeals Commission on my behalf?"
"The appeal is filed in your name, and on the day of the review you will make your statement yourself," I answered. I told him we would draft the appeal, the wording of the information disclosure request and the supplementary briefs together, and that I would organize his scattered materials. There is also an advantage when the person who knows the circumstances best makes the statement himself: the facts in the written submissions are confirmed once more, in his own words, before the commission.
He nodded. In fact, he had already had one phone consultation through the public officials' union. He had been advised that the issues were not complicated, so he should try filing the appeal himself. But when he actually sat down to write it, he did not know what to include, in what order, or where to get which materials. That was exactly where my work began.
Counting backward from the deadline
That evening I sorted things into three parts.
First, I fixed the end of the filing period. Received August 26; 30 days from the next day. The Chuseok holiday fell within that period. I set the target date for submitting the appeal as the last weekday before the holiday. There was no reason to drag it to the very end of the deadline. If the post was late or an online filing hit a file error, that one day could wipe out everything.
Second, I decided not to wait for every piece of material. In an appeal review, you can file the appeal first and submit supplementary materials afterwards. Rather than miss the deadline while trying to write a perfect appeal, it was far safer to file an appeal containing the core arguments and a plan for proof within the deadline, and then supplement the materials.
Third, I narrowed the direction of the dispute: not "revoke the penalty," but "the penalty is too heavy for the violation."
At first he naturally wanted revocation. "I applied, and the agency just didn't process it." I understood how he felt. But on paper, there clearly was a period in which income arose while permission had not been granted. An appeal that denies that loses credibility from the very first page.
Instead, we framed it like this. The violation is admitted. However, he did not deliberately avoid permission; he went through the application procedure, and that application was not processed during a personnel reshuffle. The income was small, unrelated to his duties, and immediately after it was discovered he obtained permission and put things right. If so, a pay cut is too heavy.
The most common mistake in administrative disputes is pouring energy into a fight you cannot win and losing the fight you can win.
He looked at the draft outline of the appeal for a long time and then asked, "So I'm admitting first that I did something wrong?" That was true. But deciding the scope of the admission is also the appellant's choice. He could admit that income arose before permission was granted without accepting the assessment that he tried to avoid permission. Writing facts and assessments separately: that is where the first paragraph of the appeal began. Only after reading the draft twice more did he nod. Then he wrote a small line in pencil next to the outline: admit the facts, contest the assessment.
Looking for the missing application
The problem was proving that he had "applied." There was only one reason the disciplinary committee had not accepted this point: there was no material.
Why had he not been able to submit material back then? There was a reason. When his PC was replaced during the reshuffle, his internal messenger chat history disappeared with it. The messenger stored conversations on the PC, and he had not made a backup. He tried to find the document he had uploaded in the electronic document system, but after changing departments he no longer had access to his former department's document folder. So he believed "the application had evaporated."
But electronic documents do not vanish that easily. That was exactly the point I focused on.
Messenger records stored on a personal PC can be erased, but a document uploaded to an agency's electronic document system leaves a drafting, receipt and approval history on the server. If approval had not been completed, it was likely still sitting there in a status such as "awaiting approval" or "on hold." In that case, the record was not his personal record but a public record held by the agency.
"You can request the processing history of a document you yourself submitted through an information disclosure request," I said, and he said he had not known that was possible. Most people don't. Being a civil servant does not mean knowing every administrative procedure. Even people who handle petitions every day usually don't know where to start when it becomes their own matter.
We worked out the wording of the information disclosure request together. I narrowed the request to three items: (1) whether the concurrent-employment permission application drafted by the requester around December two years earlier exists and its processing status; (2) the approval route of that document and the date and time of processing at each stage; and (3) the status of concurrent-employment permission applications received by the service department during the same period. If the scope is written too broadly, a request for correction comes back saying it "is not specified," and that takes even more time. That is why we specified the dates and document types as precisely as possible.
An information disclosure request takes about ten days to process and may be extended depending on circumstances. With the Chuseok holiday in between, there was no guarantee of getting an answer within the filing period. This is where the second principle we had set, "don't wait for the materials," mattered. We decided to state clearly in the appeal: "An information disclosure request for the electronic document processing history proving the application is under way, and it will be submitted as a supplement as soon as the reply arrives."
A word from a former colleague
That Friday, he called me.
"I spoke with the officer who was in charge of service matters back then." The two had lost touch after the reshuffle and spoke for the first time in a long while because of this. That officer said he vaguely remembered receiving the application. It was right before the transfer orders, so he had meant to put it on the handover list, but with packing and handing over work all at once, it seems to have been left out. And he reportedly added, "If you need it, I'll write a statement of facts for you."
I was glad, but also careful. A colleague's statement of facts helps, but its limits are clear. It relies on memory, and if the two are close, its credibility may be seen as low. So I asked him to make sure the statement contained only verifiable facts, without emotional wording: when and how the document was received, when the transfer took effect, how the handover went. We decided to use this statement as supporting material to back up the electronic document history once it came out.
Evidence gains strength when several pieces interlock rather than standing alone. When the agency's records and a person's memory point to the same date, it stops being a coincidence and becomes a fact.
The night I reread the rules
On a weekend night I stayed in the office and opened the standards for disciplinary penalties again. 🌙
Disciplinary action against public officials follows standards based on the type and degree of misconduct and whether it was intentional or negligent. Even for the same violation of the ban on for-profit work, "deliberately hiding it" and "going through the procedure but earning income before permission was granted" can carry different weight. Mitigating factors such as commendations or everyday work performance are also set out separately.
While reading that part, I thought again about his personnel record. At our first consultation he had mentioned in passing that a few years earlier, when he was assigned to infectious disease response work, he received a commendation from the head of the agency. I had let it pass at the time, but when I looked again at the summary of the disciplinary committee's resolution, there was no mention of his commendations. It did not show whether mitigating factors had been considered or, if they had, how they were judged.
Whether that commendation qualified for mitigation depended on the type of commendation and the rules, so I could not say for certain. But clearly stating his record of merit in the appeal and attaching a copy of the commendation and his performance evaluation records was well worth doing. The judgment belongs to the commission; the appellant's part is to put all the material for that judgment on the table.
That night I rebuilt the whole case in chronological order: channel opened, date the income threshold was met, date of the concurrent-employment application, date of the transfer, period in which income arose, date of the service inspection, date of the follow-up application, date permission was granted, date of the disciplinary resolution, date the statement of reasons was received. Lining them up, one thing stood out.
There were three weeks between the day he crossed the income threshold and the day he applied for permission. He had applied as soon as he confirmed he met the threshold. And right after the issue came up in the service inspection, he applied again and was granted permission within a month. Both applications were made "as soon as he found out." That is not the behavior pattern of someone trying to avoid permission. This single timeline became the backbone of the appeal.
Someone with something to lose
While writing the appeal, I also came to understand why he held on to this so tightly.
His child had been born that spring. His wife was on parental leave, and the interest on their jeonse loan was deducted every month. A one-month pay cut takes part of that month's pay. That alone would have been bearable.
The bigger issue was promotion. After a disciplinary penalty, promotion is restricted for a certain period, and that period differs greatly between a pay cut and a reprimand. He was up for promotion review in the first half of the next year. If the pay cut stood, he would skip that review entirely. Performance bonuses and various evaluations would be affected too. It was not one month's pay at stake, but the curve of several years of his career.
He told me this calmly. Not once did he say he had been treated unfairly. "It's true that I didn't check it through to the end." That one sentence actually set the tone of the appeal: an appeal that makes no excuses, admits what should be admitted, and on that basis asks about proportionality.
The mystery of the songpyeon box
On Tuesday of the last week before the holiday, he came to check the final version of the appeal.
He was carrying two identical paper shopping bags, one in each hand. As soon as he sat down, he slid one of them toward me. "Here, the evidence."
I opened it: songpyeon. 😄 Rice cakes his mother had made herself, half filled with sesame and half with beans. His face turned red and he pushed the other bag across; inside, neatly arranged, were the copy of his commendation, his performance evaluation records and his channel's income statements. Both were the same shopping bag from a Chuseok gift shop.
"I'll take good care of Exhibit No. 1." That afternoon the songpyeon disappeared quickly in the office. The document review took a little longer.
The four pillars of the appeal
The final appeal was built on four pillars.
First, a reorganization of the facts. The violation was admitted, but we set out in chronological order that he applied for concurrent-employment permission right after meeting the income threshold and that the application was not processed during the personnel reshuffle. We also stated that an information disclosure request was under way and that we planned to submit a supplement.
Second, the absence of intent. We put first the timeline showing that both applications were made "as soon as he found out" — behavior that could not come from someone intending to avoid permission.
Third, the degree of the violation. The income was small, a few tens of thousands of won a month; the content was camping information unrelated to his duties, with no disclosure of confidential information or damage to dignity; it was an activity outside working hours; and right after it was discovered he obtained permission and put things right.
Fourth, mitigating factors. His commendation and performance evaluations, and the point that it needed to be checked how his record of merit had been considered in the original resolution.
He signed the appeal himself and submitted it in his own name to the Appeals Commission. On the last weekday before the holiday, filing was completed in the morning. There was still time left before the deadline. The moment the receipt confirmation came, a line went through one of the bold circles on the calendar.
At the end of the appeal we added one sentence: in the appeal procedure, the decision cannot be heavier than the original penalty. Article 14(7) of the State Public Officials Act provides that, when reviewing a request from a person who received a disciplinary penalty, the Appeals Commission may not decide to impose a heavier penalty than the original one. In plain terms, you do not have to worry that filing an appeal will make things worse. Only after learning this did his expression relax a little. He said that had been the biggest reason he had hesitated to appeal.
The reply that arrived after the holiday
About a week after the holiday ended, the reply to the information disclosure request arrived.
The materials included the concurrent-employment permission application he had drafted in December two years earlier. Processing status: "awaiting approval." The date and time the officer received it were stamped on it, and it had stopped there without moving to the next stage. Neither rejected nor approved, it had sat in a corner of the server for nearly two years.
He held the materials and said nothing for a while. "So it was there." That was all.
I helped attach the materials to a supplementary brief. We kept the brief short. Rather than adding new arguments, it simply made clear that what the appeal said "would be proved" had in fact been proved: the electronic document processing history, the colleague's statement of facts and the date on the official transfer notice. All three pointed to the same period.
The agency's answer
Not long after we submitted the supplementary brief, the disciplining agency's written answer arrived. When an appeal is filed, the commission asks the agency that imposed the penalty for an answer, and a copy is also delivered to the appellant.
The answer's logic was exactly as expected. Permission for concurrent employment takes effect only when granted, and the responsibility for checking the outcome after applying lies with the applicant. Since he received income without confirming whether permission had been granted, misconduct is established. The penalty was set within the range of the standards. From the agency's standpoint these were fair things to say, and they were not wrong.
But one thing was missing from the answer: an explanation of the electronic document processing history. There was no mention of why the document stopped in "awaiting approval" after it was received, or of how pending documents were handed over during the reshuffle. The disclosure reply had only just come out when the answer was written, so the agency may not have been able to address that part.
Together we set the direction for a rebuttal. We decided not to deny the agency's logic head-on. He had already admitted in the appeal that the responsibility for checking lay with him, so there was no need to repeat it. Instead, we narrowed it to one question: "Can a person who went through the application procedure and a person who did not even apply be judged with the same weight?" Then we attached, in order, the materials that answered that question: the electronic document history, the statement of facts, the official transfer notice and the later permission.
The rebuttal was less than two pages. A short brief is good not because of its length. When the issues converge into one, the reader also makes a judgment on that one. In administrative documents, the strongest sentence is usually the shortest.
Around that time he said to me, "It feels like I'm fighting against my agency, and that makes me uncomfortable. I have to work with those people again." I told him that an appeal is less a fight than a procedure for getting a judgment reviewed once more. Nowhere in the briefs did we include a sentence blaming anyone. Pending documents slipping through during a reshuffle can happen in any organization, and there was no reason to pin it on one person's mistake. What was needed was for those circumstances to be reflected in the penalty, and nothing more.
Review day
The notice of the review date came, and on the appointed day he appeared in person and made his statement. 🍁
He prepared his statement himself. All I did was put the flow of the appeal and the supplementary brief into a one-page summary table, so he could see in order which material supported which argument. What to say was his decision. He said he would admit first what should be admitted and explain briefly what needed explaining.
That evening he texted me. "A commissioner asked, 'Why didn't you check after applying?' I said that was my fault." I replied that it was probably the best answer he could have given, because the appeal had been written in that spirit from the start.
The day the decision arrived
The decision arrived in the middle of autumn.
The result: the one-month pay cut was changed to a reprimand. Not a revocation.
The decision was measured. Since there was a period in which he engaged in for-profit work without permission, the misconduct is recognized. However, the electronic document processing history confirms that the appellant applied for concurrent-employment permission right after meeting the income threshold, that application was not processed during the agency's personnel reshuffle, and taking together the amount of income, its relation to his duties, his efforts to put things right afterwards and his record of merit, the original penalty is somewhat excessive. That was roughly the gist.
The commission did not accept every argument. It stated clearly that responsibility for failing to check lay with the appellant. I thought that part actually made the decision more persuasive. It was the result of weighing the circumstances of both sides, not just one.
A reprimand is still a disciplinary penalty. It stays on the record. But the promotion restriction period was greatly shortened, and he became eligible for next year's review. He could have taken the decision further in an administrative lawsuit, but he chose to end it here. He said he was already fully satisfied.
Monday again
A few days later he sent a short email. He said he was continuing the channel. This time he had kept a copy of the permission both as a file and on paper. He had also asked each of his colleagues in the department whether they had permission for concurrent employment and, if so, whether they had confirmed the notice of permission. Two of them had not confirmed the notice.
In administration, the distance between "I applied" and "I was granted permission" is longer than you think. If a document stops somewhere along that distance, responsibility usually comes back to the person who applied. But that does not make the circumstances of why it stopped disappear. Bringing those circumstances back to life on the record and putting them on the scale: that, in the end, was what this work was.
That Chuseok, the last two songpyeon left in the office fridge were finally eaten on the afternoon the decision arrived. They had hardened a little, but they tasted fine. 😊
If you are in this situation, check these first
① Check the date you received the statement of reasons for the disciplinary action. The filing period is 30 days starting the next day; once it passes, it is hard to get a review at all. ② Don't wait until every piece of material is gathered. You can file the appeal first within the deadline and submit materials as a supplement. ③ "Records you thought were lost" may remain in the agency's electronic document system. You can request the processing history of a document you applied for through an information disclosure request. ④ Rather than flatly denying the violation, calmly setting out intent, degree, follow-up measures and your record of merit is more persuasive. ⑤ You make the statement yourself on the day of the review. If you summarize the flow of the appeal and supplementary brief on one page, your statement will not drift from what is written.
Requirements and circumstances differ in each case, so individual confirmation is needed. If you are facing a similar concern in Yeonsu-gu or elsewhere in Incheon, I recommend going through it step by step, starting with preparing the documents.
This article is reconstructed from actual consultation cases; the people, business names, place names and figures that appear are unrelated to any specific individual or case.