A business entity who emits air pollutants shall establish air pollution prevention facilities and transmit data or measure and record them by performing a self-measurement or use a measuring agent to perform the measurement. However, recently, it was found that some workplaces that emit air pollutants and measurement agencies have manipulated the data by reducing the measurement value or submitted false test reports without actual performing any measurements.
In 2013 a waste disposal business entity was caught having manipulated the stack tele-monitoring system and emitted toxic gas exceeding the permissible emission levels for eight years. In 2016, a measuring agent was arrested and charged with having issued false measurement test reports in Gyeonggi-do. In 2018, 52 workplaces in Gyeonggi-do were caught in a “crackdown on the environmental management of facilities that cause fine dust,” and in 2019, 76 cases were detected, including false calculation of measurement results, in the "special guidance and inspection for 395 measuring agencies nationwide."
The reason for the continuous mismanagement problems of air pollutant emission in industrial facilities is that any person who fails to measure pollutants or any person who falsely records the results of measurement or fails to record and keep them is only subject to a slap on the wrist—an administrative fine not exceeding five million won.
However, the deceit of air pollutant emission values by workplaces and measurement agencies is a harmful act against people suffering the consequences of fine dust and a very serious criminal act that prevents corrective government measures by distorting even basic statistics on fine dust, and that significantly reduces the bargaining power of the Korean government to cooperate with other countries in solving the air pollution problem.
Therefore, the amendment aims to define the act of emitting air pollutants and manipulating measurement results as illegal discharge and eradicate manipulations of discharge data by imposing and collecting an amount equivalent to not less than two times, but not exceeding ten times, the profits gained from the illegal discharge and clean-up costs as a penalty surcharge (Article 2, subparagraph 2 (a)).

Impose and collect an amount equivalent to not less than two times, but not exceeding ten times, the profits gained from the illegal discharge and clean-up costs as a penalty surcharge by defining the act of emitting air pollutants, manipulating measurement results, as illegal discharge (Article 2, subparagraph 2 (a))