---
title: "Korea Fired a Museum Boss Without Checking the Law, and Now There Are Two Directors on Payroll"
description: "An unpaid-walnut-cake audit, a skipped legal review, and 80 million won of taxpayer money later"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-05T09:42:58.088Z
modified: 2026-10-05T19:12:29Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/korea-fired-a-museum-boss-without-checking-the-law-and-now-t-60eb26
language: en
tags: ["politics", "bureaucracy", "law", "history", "corruption", "asia"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Korea Fired a Museum Boss Without Checking the Law, and Now There Are Two Directors on Payroll

*An unpaid-walnut-cake audit, a skipped legal review, and 80 million won of taxpayer money later*

By Nate Ledger · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/korea-fired-a-museum-boss-without-checking-the-law-and-now-t-60eb26

## In brief

- The veterans ministry ran no internal or external legal review before firing Independence Hall director Kim Hyung-suk, lawmaker Shin Dong-wook says
- The dismissal followed an audit citing 14 violations, including accepting 600 walnut pastries from an on-site vendor
- The Supreme Court ruled Kim cannot return to work but must be paid, costing about 78.77 million won over seven months
- With Kim’s term running to August 2027 and a successor already appointed, the state is paying two directors’ salaries
- The ministry says the board vote and administrative hearing made the dismissal legitimate, so no separate advice was needed

Here is a simple piece of management advice, applicable to businesses, nonprofits and government ministries alike. If you are about to do something that has never been done before in your organization’s 40-year history — like, say, firing the director of the Independence Hall for the first time since it opened — you might consider asking a lawyer whether you are doing it correctly. The ask-a-lawyer step is cheap. The alternative can get expensive.

South Korea’s Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs skipped that step. According to documents obtained by Shin Dong-wook, a People Power Party lawmaker on the National Assembly’s National Policy Committee, the ministry conducted neither an internal legal review nor sought outside legal advice on the grounds and procedures for dismissing Kim Hyung-suk as director of the Independence Hall of Korea before doing so, the Chosun Ilbo reported. Kim was fired on February 19, by President Lee Jae-myung, after an audit, a board vote and a recommendation from Veterans Minister Kwon Oh-eul. Clean process, arguably. Lawyer-free process, definitely.

## The pastries

What did Kim allegedly do? The ministry audited him starting last September and cited 14 violations, including leasing out basic property for free, accepting goods and soliciting donations. The goods-acceptance charge is the memorable one: Kim is accused of receiving 600 walnut pastries — hodu-gwaja, a Cheonan specialty — free of charge from a vendor operating inside the hall. Kim’s defense is that he gave the pastries away to visitors. You may have views on whether 600 walnut cakes given to museum-goers constitutes the sort of corruption that justifies the first director dismissal in four decades. The ministry’s view was that it justified exactly that, and the current ruling bloc had wanted Kim out anyway: the Democratic Party had long branded him “pro-Japan” and “New Right” for saying that both Syngman Rhee and Kim Koo should be honored as founding fathers, that some figures were unfairly smeared as collaborators, and for describing liberation in last year’s 80th-anniversary address as, from a world-historical perspective, “a gift won through the Allies’ victory” — remarks the party called a denigration of the independence movement and a “historical coup.”

## The meter is running

Kim sued to overturn the dismissal and applied for a stay. Last month, on the 2nd, the Supreme Court issued a final ruling in the stay proceedings that split the difference in the most expensive possible way: no reinstatement to the job, but the salary must be paid. So the state now pays a man not to do a job it insists it was right to fire him from. Per the ministry’s own submission to Shin’s office, the salary paid to Kim for his non-working period, covering May through September, came to 51,272,240 won — roughly 10 million won a month. Add the 27.5 million won the ministry spent hiring legal counsel for the dismissal lawsuit, and the seven-month tab comes to about 78.77 million won, per the Chosun Ilbo’s tally.

And it gets better, by which I mean worse. Kim’s legal term runs until August of next year, so the roughly 10-million-won-a-month payments continue until the main lawsuit concludes. Meanwhile, in April, President Lee appointed a new director, Kim Hee-gon — who also draws a salary. The Independence Hall of Korea, an institution devoted to the proposition that Koreans govern themselves, currently has one director doing the job and another being paid not to, a state of affairs Shin described as the ministry producing “the absurd situation of having two directors” because it dismissed one “without a single legal review” and appointed his successor before the process even finished. He has promised to grill the ministry on both the decision and the procedure at this year’s parliamentary audit.

To be fair, there is a mechanism by which this ends well for the taxpayer. A ministry official said that if a court ultimately rules the dismissal was legitimate, the salary can be clawed back. So the 78.77 million won is less a sunk cost than a very large, involuntary escrow deposit on the government’s own litigation position — a position it formed, you will recall, without asking any lawyers in advance. The ministry’s response to all this was that it released the audit findings, the hall’s board passed a dismissal recommendation, the matter went through a hearing under the Administrative Procedures Act, and so the firing was legitimate and “there was no need for separate advice.”

Sure. Possibly true! The Supreme Court may yet agree that everything was done properly, the money comes back, and the skipped legal review turns out to have been a reasonable economy rather than a false one. That is the thing about not asking a lawyer: it is only ever expensive when you were wrong. The courts will now decide which it was, at a running cost of about 10 million won a month, plus pastries.