The Ministry of Employment and Labor (“MOEL”) recently amended its Labor Inspector Work Regulations, effective as of September 1, 2019, mainly to enhance the efficiency of labor inspections by, among other things, expanding the scope of businesses subject to labor inspections.  The key details of the amended Regulations are as follows: 

• Special labor inspections, which were previously conducted on businesses that had labor disputes or had received criticism from the public, etc., will now also be conducted on “businesses which received criticism from the public for unfair treatment against employees, such as verbal abuse, assault, workplace harassment, sexual harassment, etc.” 
• During the process of inspecting a particular business, if it is found that other businesses that entered into certain types of service agreements with the business, such as a subcontract agreement or a worker dispatch agreement, violated labor laws, the labor inspector may also inspect those other businesses (principal company, subcontractor, service recipient company, etc.). 
• For regular/occasional inspections, the scope of the inspection shall cover the period of one year before the inspection date, and for special inspections, the relevant period shall cover the three years before the inspection date. However, if it is determined that repeated labor law violations occurred or occurred prior to these defined periods, the scope of the inspection may be expanded to labor law violations that occurred before these periods for which the statutes of limitations have not expired. 
• If any allegation is raised by a news article/media report, anonymous report or rumor, and a labor inspector, through internal investigation, recognizes the allegations of criminal conduct, a criminal investigation shall be immediately commenced. 

In addition, the MOEL issued a press release on September 11, 2019 concerning the establishment and implementation of “Comprehensive Improvement Plans for the Administration of Labor Inspections”, and stated that it would implement strategic labor inspections to proactively address social issues and also implement inspections based on data analysis using big data analysis.  In the press release, the MOEL stated that the key areas of focus will be “workplace harassment, working hours, minimum wage, illegal dispatch, and unfair labor practice,” and stated that it would especially strengthen planned labor inspections for businesses at high risk of violating the relevant laws.  The press release also noted that the focus will be on inspecting industries and sectors with poor working environments and that have generally not been subject to inspections.   

The MOEL announced that it would expand and create more digital forensic teams in addition to the existing ones in six regional labor offices to enhance collection of scientific evidence.  In practice, “digital forensic” methods were used in only 418 cases during the first half of 2019, which is almost double the amount of an average year.  Pursuant to the policy to enhance labor inspections, businesses will be required to even more strictly comply with the relevant laws.