Korea has 24 staff supporting crackdowns on about 11,000 illegal gambling-style game venues

Strip out the seven fixed-term posts and the 17 permanent staff each cover about 647 venues ^[2]. The workload is rising. Appraisal and enforcement support for illegal game products climbed 18.9% to 1,220 cases in the first half ^[8], and with the on-site cases added the total comes to about 61 per staffer in six months ^[3]. The committee also ran 54 training sessions for 1,049 police officers over the same period ^[9].

Coverage of the venues themselves is thin. If each on-site case were a separate venue, the committee would reach about 2.3% of the 11,000 in half a year, or each venue roughly once every 22 years at that pace ^[4]. The repeat violations found on re-inspection come as a count ^[11]; the committee did not say how many venues it went back to, so the repeat rate is unknown.

The cases show how much money these venues move. The Daegu chain's revenue works out to about 2 billion won a year for each directly run store ^[5]. The Ulsan ring's reach equals about a fifth of the committee's national count ^[6]. A court approved the pre-indictment confiscation and preservation of about 2.7 billion won of that ring's proceeds ^[5].

Lim, a Democratic Party lawmaker whose office obtained the data ^[1], wants success measured differently. "Performance should not be measured only by how many cases were caught. We need to expand the number of on-site specialists and build a follow-up system that continuously tracks repeat violations by cited venues," Lim said ^[13].

The record fits several outcomes. The first is the expansion Lim describes, carried out inside the existing committee ^[13]. The second is a separate body for repeat offenders, the broadest reading of what Seoul Economic Daily reports as persistent calls for a system with dedicated expertise ^[12]. The third is no new staff, with police carrying the load. Their sweep of illegal adult internet cafes from Aug. 24 to Sept. 11 found 387 cases, up 22% from a year earlier ^[10].

I'd expect the first. Lim's is the only proposal in the record with a named sponsor, and it needs headcount at a committee that already exists ^[13]. The counter-case is that police do the arresting and are scaling up without the committee growing, so 24 support staff may slow product appraisals more than they slow crackdowns ^[10][8]. A bill or budget line creating a standalone regulator would prove this view wrong.