Seoul school facility budget execution rate stood at 69.6% last year

Rep. Park Beom-gye: check spending before blaming fiscal shortfalls

Education office says 4.6% lapsed; carried-over funds already earmarked

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, which says it faces a 420 billion won shortfall in school facility funding for next year, failed to spend 331 billion won of its facility improvement budget last year. Pictured are students leaving a middle school in Seoul. [Yonhap]
The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, which says it faces a 420 billion won shortfall in school facility funding for next year, failed to spend 331 billion won of its facility improvement budget last year. Pictured are students leaving a middle school in Seoul. [Yonhap]

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, which has said it faces a 420 billion won ($316 million) shortfall in school facility funding for next year, failed to spend 331 billion won of its facility improvement budget within last year's fiscal year. The education office said about 281.3 billion won of that amount was carried over to the following year for winter-break construction work and should not be counted as lapsed funds.

According to data that Rep. Park Beom-gye of the Democratic Party of Korea, a member of the National Assembly's education committee, obtained from the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education on Wednesday, the total approved budget for the school facility environment improvement project last year was 1.09 trillion won. Actual expenditure came to 758.6 billion won, putting the execution rate at 69.6 percent.

Of the remaining 331 billion won, about 281.3 billion won was carried over to the next fiscal year, while 49.7 billion won lapsed. Carried-over funds can be used to continue projects in the following fiscal year, while lapsed funds represent budget that was left unspent and closed out for the year.

Park said large-scale carryovers and lapses were recurring even within existing budgets, contrary to the education office's claim that it lacked sufficient funds for school facility improvements. Seoul Superintendent of Education Jeong Geun-sik had earlier told a national audit session that the school facility budget for next year was short by about 420 billion won even after repeated cuts to requests from the field.

Safety-related projects were also among those carried over. According to the lawmaker's data, 19 of the top 30 projects by carryover amount last year were school facility environment improvement projects, totaling 71.3 billion won. Of those, about 19.9 billion won was carried over across seven projects — four involving asbestos removal and three involving seismic reinforcement.

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education issued an explanatory statement Wednesday, rebuffing the criticism and urging that the nature of school construction work be taken into account. The office said 97 percent of last year's carryovers arose from concentrating construction during the winter break to protect students' safety and right to learn.

School construction work typically runs from late December through late February of the following year. The special accounts for education expenses, however, close out at the end of December. Because the fiscal year turns before construction is finished, project costs are frequently carried over to the next year, the office said.

Excluding carryovers, the office said lapsed funds amounted to 4.6 percent of the total budget last year. Of that, 29 billion won represented unspent execution balances from project completions and bid savings, while 17.9 billion won stemmed from plan changes due to shifts in the academic calendar.

The office said the 420 billion won shortfall in next year's facility budget represents new project costs that could not be budgeted, and is fundamentally different in nature from the carried-over funds, which already have designated uses and spending plans.

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education said it agreed with the criticism that more effort was needed to raise budget execution rates and minimize carryovers and lapses. It said it would strengthen communication with schools by gathering input from school communities and verifying project feasibility in advance to reduce unspent funds caused by plan changes.


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