[Exclusive] Illegal distribution of Onnuri gift certificates checked only once a year

[Anchor]

This is a garlic store in Daegu.

A family operates three stores, including this one, and this year, they have exchanged hundreds of billions of won worth of Onnuri gift certificates, raising suspicions of improper distribution.

When banks sell paper gift certificates, they offer a discount of 5-10%, but merchants can exchange them for cash at face value, suggesting they may have pocketed the difference in this process.

The government announced that it established a monitoring system in 2020 to prevent the improper distribution of gift certificates.

However, KBS's investigation revealed that the system has not been effectively monitoring the situation.

This is an exclusive report by reporter Kim Jin-hee.

[Report]

Last month, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups distributed a report on Onnuri gift certificates.

They stated that they would enhance a monitoring system to 'detect suspicious transactions in real-time' to prevent improper distribution of gift certificates.

Each financial institution sends information on stores that exchanged gift certificates and the unique numbers of those gift certificates to the Korea Financial Telecommunications and Clearings Institute (KFTC) once a day.

This information is then passed on to the Small Enterprise and Market Service (SEMS) to catch suspicious transactions.

[Official at Ministry of SMEs and Startups/voice altered: "For example, if a store exchanges gift certificates with unique numbers from 1 to 100, wouldn't that raise suspicion? We can catch such things at the exchange stage."]

However, KBS's investigation confirmed that real-time detection of improper distribution has been impossible from the beginning.

The SEMS received data from the KFTC only once in February of this year, with the previous data being from November 2022, making it just two instances.

They received a year's worth of data all at once, once a year, to verify it.

One store had been engaging in improper distribution of gift certificates for over six months without being caught.

[SEMS official/voice altered: "While real-time data accumulation is taking place and suspicious transactions are being checked, we faced limitations in manpower to analyze the data daily and take immediate follow-up actions."]

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups is conducting a comprehensive investigation into the top 15 merchants by monthly sales of Onnuri gift certificates and is re-evaluating the issues with the monitoring system for improper distribution.

KBS News, Kim Jin-hee.