Ministry of Patriots and Veterans earned 'excellent' rating for employment support program

Ministry tallied new hires every year but never tracked total eligible population

Long-term job retention data also absent despite repeated system upgrades

Lawmaker Han Chang-min calls it 'performance management without a denominator'

Social Democratic Party lawmaker Han Chang-min [Han's office]
Social Democratic Party lawmaker Han Chang-min [Han's office]

The Ministry of Patriots and Veterans received an "excellent" rating for its employment support program for veterans and their families — citing strong figures on new hires and six-month job retention rates — but it has never separately tracked the total number of people eligible for that support, it has been confirmed.

Critics in the political arena say the ministry has been evaluating the program's performance every year without ever establishing how many people it is actually supposed to serve.

According to documents submitted by the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans to the office of Han Chang-min, a lawmaker on the National Assembly's Political Affairs Committee representing the Social Democratic Party, the ministry has not separately managed data on the number of people eligible for employment support among independence merit holders and national merit holders, nor their age distribution, for the past decade. In response to Han's office's request for the relevant data, the ministry said it "does not separately manage annual figures on the eligible population for employment support."

The ministry has, however, tallied program results every year. Last year alone, it supported 8,325 veterans and others in finding new employment, surpassing its annual target of 7,400. The six-month job retention rate among newly employed beneficiaries also stayed above 90 percent for three consecutive years — 90.4 percent in 2023, 91.6 percent in 2024, and 92.7 percent in 2025.

On the strength of rising new-hire numbers and program results, the ministry also received an "excellent" rating in the 2026 employment project evaluation. The program is designed to promote the financial stability and self-fulfillment of veterans and their families.

The problem, critics say, is that those eligible for employment support do not simply overlap with the broader veteran population. Eligibility varies depending on the type of merit holder, registration date, family relationship, disability or impairment rating, and age — yet the ministry has not tracked the size of the eligible pool under these criteria.

The ministry began building a next-generation integrated veterans information system in 2017, and in 2018 it rebuilt its support operations — covering employment, education, medical care and welfare — along with its statistical system. It completed the next-generation system in 2019, and in 2023 it upgraded its veterans statistics portal and built a data analysis and utilization platform.

Despite these repeated upgrades to its statistical infrastructure, the ministry never maintained basic data on the eligible population for employment support. Critics say this amounts to "performance management without a denominator" — tracking placement numbers as a success metric while never establishing the size of the population the program is meant to reach.

The job retention metric used as the official performance indicator has also drawn criticism for failing to capture long-term employment stability. The ministry uses "the share of newly employed beneficiaries who remain employed for six months or more" as its official benchmark.

A breakdown of tenure lengths among employment support recipients over the past five years shows that those employed for six months to under one year were the largest group, at 15,264 people, or 40.2 percent. Those employed for two years or more numbered 11,287 (29.8 percent), followed by those employed for one year to under two years at 6,670 (17.6 percent), and those employed for three to under six months at 2,433 (6.4 percent).

However, those figures reflect tenure lengths measured at the time of the survey, meaning more recent hires may not yet have reached longer tenure thresholds. Critics say the ministry needs a long-term performance management approach — tracking, for instance, whether each cohort of new hires has maintained employment for one or two years after placement.

"The ministry manages as annual performance metrics how many people found new jobs and how many stayed employed for six months, yet it has been evaluating the program without ever establishing who needs support and how many of them there are," Han said. "Not separately managing even a decade's worth of data on the eligible population is performance management without a denominator — pure guesswork."

Han added that the program's performance indicators needed to go beyond the six-month retention mark. "Employment support for veterans is not simple job placement — it is a veterans welfare program aimed at financial stability and self-fulfillment, yet the performance indicator stops at six-month retention, making it impossible to assess long-term outcomes," he said. "The program management framework must be restructured so that every stage can be monitored and followed up on — from the eligible population, to those who apply for support, to new hires, to those who remain employed for one or two years."


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