Government legislation ministry allows discipline reduction for serious misconduct

The Ministry of Government Legislation said in a response dated June 4 to a civil petition that public officials facing disciplinary action may receive reduced penalties if their violations occurred through negligence during sincere and active work processes, even if the violations fall under categories typically excluded from reduction.

The ministry explained that exclusion clauses listed in Paragraph 2 of Article 4 of the Enforcement Rules of the Public Official Discipline Act were designed to limit reductions based on prior achievements under Paragraph 1, not to block assessments of the specific context in which a violation occurred.

The ministry argued that administrative regulations serving as the basis for detrimental actions must be interpreted strictly. Expanding the interpretation to automatically exclude such violations from mitigation would constitute an excessive extension unfavorable to the official.

While some might argue that certain acts cannot result from sincere work processes, the ministry said this is a matter for the disciplinary committee to judge based on the nature and content of the violation, rather than an automatic bar.

The ministry also recommended that if lawmakers intend to limit mitigation strictly to non-excluded violations, the rules should be amended to state this explicitly, noting that the legislative intent behind the January 10, 2017 revision does not support broadly applying exclusion criteria to both achievement-based and context-based mitigation.