Under the Local Autonomy Act, an ordinance on resident audit requests was enacted in June 2000, allowing residents to request audits of the administration directly from higher authorities. Audit requests can cover matters in which the handling of affairs within the powers of a local government or its head clearly violates the law or the public interest, and residents can jointly sign to request that the province audit city or county affairs.

This resident audit request system was expected from the start not only to raise transparency and trust by feeding residents' views about the administration directly into audits, but also to serve as a safeguard against the misconduct or arbitrary rule of elected local leaders that began to be raised after local autonomy was introduced.

But 17 years after its launch, residents hardly use it. Observers explain that the system has become an empty shell because unlawful matters other than the mayor's political decisions can be handled as ordinary civil complaints, and because the procedures and rules for audit requests are complicated.

A resident audit request goes through a complicated process taking 60 days in total, including applying for and receiving a representative's certificate, collecting residents' signatures and submitting the list of petitioners, publishing the request and making the list available for inspection, carrying out the audit, and publishing and notifying the results. In Gimje City, for example, the ordinance requires at least 200 residents to sign, which critics say is too many in practice. On top of that, filing easy online complaints has recently become common, and the city promoted the system only briefly in its first year, so it has not had the effect originally hoped for.

Despite the good intention of having direct resident participation complement indirect democracy and revitalize local autonomy, the system fails to do its job, and since critics say the number of required signatures was set unreasonably high from the start, it needs to be adjusted so that it can take root. If Gyeonggi Province insists on around 6,000 petitioners, the system will hardly be effective. The number of petitioners should be cut sharply now, with measures to prevent excessive requests and side effects, for example by excluding matters involved in investigations or trials, matters that may invade privacy, and matters under audit by other agencies. In any case, I hope this system takes root and helps improve residents' welfare, ending the practice of higher authorities judging group complaints at will and closing them with a brief inquiry, and the practice of the Ombudsman ignoring its own guidelines on resolving multi-party complaints.

To add: the Local Autonomy Act, fully revised in 2021 and in force since January 13, 2022, moved resident audit requests to Article 21, lowered the eligible age from 19 to 18, and lowered the cap on the required number of petitioners, to be set by ordinance within 300 for provinces, 200 for cities with 500,000 or more people and 150 for cities, counties and districts. The period for filing was also extended from two to three years after the affairs were handled or ended. Residents who filed an audit request can bring a resident lawsuit (Article 22) if they are dissatisfied with the audit results.