Unaccompanied Deaths Managed Inconsistently... Local Governments Failing to Track Death Reports [2025 Unaccompanied Deaths Report 13]

Departments Range from Welfare to Elderly and Disabled Services, and Livelihood Support
Many Unclaimed Deaths Go Untracked, Including Death Reporting and Case Management

It has been revealed that there are serious gaps in national administrative statistics, as each local government has a different department responsible for unaccompanied deaths, making it difficult to even determine whether a death has been reported.

Dedicated Departments for Unaccompanied Deaths Differ by Local Government

An analysis of the departments in charge of unaccompanied deaths across all 229 basic local governments nationwide as of December 30, 2025, showed that 141 local governments (61.6%) have welfare-related departments, such as the Welfare Policy Division or Social Welfare Division, overseeing this work. The remaining 88 local governments (38.4%) assigned the responsibility to departments that are either unrelated to the nature of the work or limited to specific groups.

Specifically, 38 local governments, accounting for 16.6% of the total, have specialized departments for the elderly or disabled, such as the Elderly and Disabled Division or Senior and Disabled Division, as the main department handling these cases. Considering that, among the 23,097 unaccompanied deaths with identifiable ages in the past five years, 9,577 (41.5%) were non-elderly, there are concerns that it is difficult to provide specialized responses for young and middle-aged individuals.

In 25 local governments (10.9%), the main department is the Livelihood Security Division or similar, which mainly focuses on managing recipients of basic livelihood security benefits. This is an administratively convenient arrangement that reduces unaccompanied deaths to merely an issue of poverty. In reality, among the 23,643 unaccompanied deaths over the past five years, only 7,024 individuals (29.7%) were either non-recipients or could not have their recipient status verified.

Additionally, 14 local governments (6.1%) assigned the responsibility to family-related departments, such as the Family Happiness Division, which handles childbirth and childcare, while the remaining 11 local governments (4.8%) assigned it to departments with no relevant connection, such as the Life Safety Division or Population Policy Division.

Poor Management of Death Reporting and Body Collection

Because the managing departments are so varied, even the management of death reporting is not being properly conducted. Among unaccompanied deaths in the past five years, 1,948 cases, accounting for 8.2% of all deaths, could not be confirmed by the responsible local government as to whether a death report had been filed. By metropolitan area, Gyeonggi Province had the most cases at 662 (34.0%), followed by Seoul with 474 (24.3%), Gangwon Province with 240 (12.3%), and Ulsan with 222 (11.4%).

There were also 1,748 cases, or 7.4% of all deaths, in which it was not confirmed whether the body was collected by family or whether there were any relatives. Of these, Gyeonggi Province accounted for 1,059 cases, or 60.6% of those for whom the body’s recipient could not be identified. This was followed by Jeju Province with 359 cases (20.5%) and Seoul with 225 cases (12.9%). Even the essential procedure of locating relatives is effectively not functioning due to poor management and administrative gaps at the local government level.

There were 1,160 cases (4.9%) in which it was not possible to confirm whether the deceased was a recipient of basic livelihood security benefits, with about half of these cases (565) occurring in Gyeonggi Province. Whether or not someone was a recipient is a record that shows whether the deceased was at least within the minimum social safety net while alive. The absence of such records means that deaths are occurring throughout society in which the deceased were not only cut off from family but also completely disconnected from the national administrative system.

Furthermore, there were numerous cases in which even the deceased’s last known address or gender information was missing. There were 3,718 cases, or 15.7% of all deaths, in which the last address could not be identified. Even excluding cases where identification was impossible from the outset, such as with skeletal remains, administrative errors or omissions resulted in 1,250 deaths (5.3%) where the gender could not be determined, revealing poor management.