[Gwanga in] "It Doesn't Work with Effort"... KEPCO Trying to Change Government Management Evaluation

Korea Electric Power Corporation Without Excellence Grade for 8 Years
Recently Launched Government Evaluation Indicator Improvement TF
Aiming to Change Unreasonable Methods
Plan to Prepare Improvement Measures and Propose to Ministry of Economy and Finance

Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) is proposing a new evaluation method to the government to achieve high scores in public institution management assessments. This is because some evaluation areas are structurally impossible to score well in, even with KEPCO's own efforts.

On the 11th, KEPCO established an internal "2025 Government Evaluation Indicator Improvement Task Force (TF)." The TF will undertake the task of changing 10 out of the 11 indicators used by the government to evaluate public institutions. It will also create two new indicators. The TF is led by the Director of Planning and includes 45 employees across six divisions. A KEPCO official stated, "Proactive improvement efforts are essential for indicators expected to see score declines in 2025," adding, "We will prepare comprehensive improvement plans, including changing the current evaluation methods, through cooperation between the indicator management departments and the Management Research Institute."

KEPCO formed the TF to improve indicators in order to receive an excellent rating in public institution evaluations. High scores in these evaluations come with benefits such as performance bonuses. However, KEPCO's last A grade was in 2015. In the 2023 management evaluation announced in June, KEPCO received a B grade (Good) due to improvements in its financial situation, but it has mostly remained between C (Average) and D (Poor) grades over the past five years.

The parts KEPCO aims to change are some unreasonable items within the "quantitative evaluation." Achieving an A grade requires meeting objective targets, but indicators often change due to external variables rather than internal efforts, or excessively high targets are set. In fact, institutions that received an A grade last year scored an average of 86.2% in the quantitative evaluation. KEPCO, which received a B grade, scored 80.5%, ranking 21st out of 32 public enterprises.

There are particularly many complaints within KEPCO about some quantitative evaluation methods. A representative indicator is "Renewable Energy Grid Connection." Since performance varies depending on renewable energy power producers, it has been analyzed that "KEPCO alone cannot be expected to achieve the targets." The power outage failure rate is similar. Currently, KEPCO's target for power outage failure rate management is 0%, so even one outage results in a significant score deduction. Digitalization of power facilities, power supply costs, and research and development performance creation have also been identified as areas for revision.

A KEPCO official said, "This proposal is a routine procedure," adding, "We plan to finalize the improvement plan by the end of next month and submit it to the Ministry of Economy and Finance." Afterwards, the evaluation team will review the related content, and the Public Institution Management Committee will conduct deliberations.