South Korea's Financial Supervisory Service is losing more than a hundred staff a year, and the government has not yet said whether it will be moved out of Seoul. Figures the office of MP Park Sung-hoon obtained from the regulator, released on the 23rd, put departures over the past five years — 2022 to July this year — at 481. The yearly count has risen each year: 102, 103, 110, then 112 in 2025, with 54 gone by the end of last month.
The age profile is the part the regulator will worry about. Staff in their twenties, thirties and forties account for 180 of those 481, or 37.4 percent. Narrow it to this year alone and they are 27 of the 54 — about half. These are the years in which an examiner learns the work and becomes worth keeping.
Sitting over all of it is the government's second round of relocating public institutions out of the capital, for which the FSS is named as a candidate. What staff say they would do about that has been measured. A union survey of 1,538 members found 69.7 percent would actively consider changing jobs if headquarters moved, rising to 85.6 percent if those who would merely consider it are counted. Among staff under forty the figures are 82.5 and 92.5 percent. Among the accountants who answered — including those with foreign qualifications — 78.9 percent said they would actively consider leaving. The union issued a statement on the 17th calling the relocation a terrible move that would push a supervisor that belongs at the front line into the rear, and asked for the discussion to stop.
An FSS official quoted by 한국경제TV put the arithmetic domestically rather than institutionally: younger staff often have a spouse working and children in school, so moving the whole family is hard, and the alternative is a job that lets them stay in Seoul.
Where they go is documented, because departing officials must clear a re-employment review by the government ethics committee. Over roughly the past decade — 2016 to July this year — the destination with the most reviews was the law firm Kim & Chang, with 25. Then Lee & Ko with 12, Yulchon 10, Shin & Kim 9, Bae Kim & Lee 8, Yoon & Yang 6. More recently the crypto industry appears on the same list, which the FSS supervises and inspects: Dunamu with 9 reviews, the Bithumb group with 7.
Why it is on the board
Top of the Korean reading list when we collected, which aggregates several newspapers' most-read items, carried by 한국경제TV.
The two accounts we have divide the story cleanly. 한국경제TV has the departure counts and where people went, from a legislator's data request. 아주경제 has the union's own survey. They overlap on exactly one set of numbers — 1,538 members, 69.7 percent, 82.5 percent — and those match to the decimal.
확인: 한국경제TV · 아주경제