South Korean Public Institution Employee Fired for Unauthorized Mining, Court Dismisses Wrongful Dismissal Lawsuit

According to Yonhap News Agency, a former department head surnamed A at the Korea Food Research Institute filed an administrative lawsuit after being fired for privately mining cryptocurrency in the institution's warehouse, but was ruled to have lost the case by the Seoul Administrative Court on the 3rd of last month. According to the investigation, between February and September 2023, A unauthorizedly installed 2 GPU servers in the idle Promotion Hall warehouse of the institute and used institutional budget to complete air conditioning, network, and electrical renovation projects, cumulatively illegally mining approximately 71 million altcoins. After the incident was discovered, A also forged approval documents attempting to retrieve the GPU servers to destroy evidence. In addition, between August 2023 and May 2024, A used an unauthorized VPN to clock in in violation of regulations a total of 117 times, indirectly causing important scientific research data of the institute to be illegally leaked. The Audit Committee of the National Research Council for Science & Technology launched a special audit on A in 2024, subsequently reported to the police, and requested the institute to impose a dismissal penalty. After A's internal appeals and relief applications to the Local Labor Relations Commission and the Central Labor Relations Commission were all rejected, A resorted to the administrative court, but still ended in defeat. The court ruled that the dismissal "did not involve any circumstances clearly violating social common sense or abuse of discretion." In the criminal case, A was charged with crimes such as theft, violation of the Information and Communications Network Act, and forgery of private documents, sentenced to 1 year in prison in the first instance, and the second instance upheld the original verdict in April this year, formally finalizing the sentence.