Korea's Serious Accidents Punishment Act: 6 Things Foreign Parents Miss
Several jurisdictions covered in this series place personal duties on named individuals. South Korea goes further than any of them. Its Serious Accidents Punishment Act provides for imprisonment of not less than one year for the person responsible for management where a serious accident causes a death.
Not a maximum of one year. A minimum.
The Act was passed in January 2021 and came into force on 27 January 2022 for businesses with fifty or more employees. It was then extended, and that extension is what most foreign parents have missed.
Six things to understand.
1. It now covers small offices
From 27 January 2024 the Act applies to businesses with between five and forty-nine employees, following the expiry of a two-year grace period during which the National Assembly declined to grant a further deferral despite substantial pressure from smaller employers.
Businesses with fewer than five regular workers remain outside the serious industrial accident provisions.
The practical consequence is direct. A foreign-owned Seoul office with a dozen people was outside this regime until January 2024 and is inside it now. Korean firms published detailed guidance when the scope expanded, and the extension received far less attention outside Korea than inside it.
2. The liability attaches to one identified person
The Act is a criminal statute directed at the business owner or the responsible management personnel, which in Korean corporate governance generally means the representative director: the top decision-maker for the business in Korea.
This is a personal criminal exposure rather than a corporate one, although the company faces separate liability. Where a fatality occurs, the individual faces imprisonment of at least one year and a fine of up to one billion won, and the corporate entity faces a fine of up to five billion won. Where a serious accident does not result in death, the individual exposure runs to imprisonment of up to seven years or a fine of up to one hundred million won.
Punitive damages of up to five times actual damages are also available, which is unusual in Korean civil law and reflects the intent behind the statute.
The Act draws acknowledged inspiration from the British corporate manslaughter legislation, and has gone considerably beyond it.
3. The duty is about resourcing and monitoring, which makes it a group question
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The point that should concern anyone reading this from London or New York.
What the responsible management personnel must do is put in place appropriate resources in terms of personnel, budget and organisation, and receive reports and issue instructions so that the effectiveness of the safety and health management system is monitored and deficiencies remediated.
Read that as a governance duty rather than an operational one, because that is what it is. And then consider where decisions about headcount, budget and systems for a small Korean subsidiary are actually made. If the Seoul representative director requests resources and the group declines them, the person carrying the criminal exposure is in Korea and the decision was made elsewhere.
That is a conversation to have deliberately rather than discover after an incident. Practitioner commentary sets out the duties and the early case law in detail.
4. It reaches people who are not your employees
The provision that catches organisations using flexible or outsourced staffing, which describes a great many foreign operations in Korea.
The Act expands the scope of protection from employees to workers, expressly including those without an employment relationship, such as people providing labour through contracting or outsourcing arrangements. Related duties include establishing and implementing criteria and procedures for evaluating a third party's capability on serious accident prevention when contracting or subcontracting.
So a Korean entity that engages contractors, uses an outsourced service provider, or staffs through an intermediary has not narrowed its exposure. It has added a duty to assess the safety capability of whoever it engages.
5. It is being enforced
The question every general counsel asks, and the answer is not reassuring.
Prosecutions have followed. A representative director was convicted in April 2023 and given a suspended custodial sentence alongside a corporate fine, and Korean practitioners reported the first arrest and detention under the Act in August 2024.
The statutory minimum sentence for a fatality means that judicial discretion operates on suspension rather than on whether a custodial term is available. That is a materially different risk profile from a regime where a fine is the expected outcome.
6. It sits on top of the existing safety statute, not instead of it
A structural point that determines what compliance work is actually required.
Korea already had an Occupational Safety and Health Act, which continues to apply and contains the substantive safety obligations: risk assessment, safety and health committees, training, medical examinations and reporting. SAPA does not replace it. SAPA punishes failures of management that result in a serious accident, and the underlying obligations remain where they were.
The practical implication is that a group cannot address SAPA in isolation. What protects the responsible management personnel is a functioning safety and health management system under the existing statute, documented, resourced and monitored. There is no separate SAPA compliance exercise that substitutes for that. Korean legislation is available in English through the Korean Law Information Center.
What a Seoul entity needs
| Item | Requirement | Common position |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Confirm whether the entity is above five workers | Assumed exempt as a small office |
| Responsible person | Identified, and aware of the personal exposure | Not briefed |
| Resourcing | Personnel, budget and organisation in place | Decided at group level without this in view |
| Monitoring | Reports received, instructions issued, deficiencies remediated | Informal |
| Contractors | Capability evaluation criteria established | Not considered |
| Underlying system | Functioning arrangements under the safety statute | Group policy, translated |
| Records | Evidence of the above, retrievable | Held abroad |
Rows two and three are the ones to raise this week, and they are board-level rather than operational. Everything else follows from taking them seriously.
The wider pattern
Korea belongs to a growing group of jurisdictions where the duty attaches to a named individual rather than to an organisation.
Australia and New Zealand impose personal, non-delegable due diligence duties on officers, which can reach people who participate in decisions from outside the country. South Africa places the primary duty on the person with overall management and control, requiring a foreign-owned entity to identify who that actually is. Hong Kong raised its penalties in 2023 with provision for individual exposure. Malaysia allows personal prosecution of directors where an offence is attributable to their neglect.
The common question is the same in every case, and it is not a health and safety question in the traditional sense. Who, by name, holds this, do they know, and do they have the resources to discharge it. A group policy does not answer that, and in Korea the consequence of getting it wrong is measured in years rather than pounds.
Holding appointments, resourcing decisions and monitoring evidence across every entity in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits provide the independent verification these duties increasingly expect.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite coordinates locally qualified practitioners across Asia Pacific, so Korean obligations are addressed under Korean law while your group keeps one point of contact and one view of compliance. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with finance and banking, IT and software and legal organisations.
Our global health and safety consultants can establish which of your people carry personal duties in which jurisdictions, and our international health and safety consultants confirm what is outstanding locally.
If your Seoul entity has more than five workers and nobody has briefed its representative director since January 2024, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
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Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
