Government needs to collect various data and information for desirable policy making, and to investigate many kinds of duties and regulations for the enforcement of policies and laws. This kind of investigation could be performed using several instruments such as requesting data, inspecting scene, inquiry and the tracing of bank accounts if needed.

Administrative investigation is necessary to guarantee the effec- tiveness of policies and regulations, but also has potential to threaten the liberties and rights of people during the process of investigation. The greatest complaint about administrative investigation is repetitive and overlapped investigation. Regarding the complaint that repetitive investigation is too frequent, some companies claim that they are inspected by various government agencies more than 100 days annually. Additionally, investigation plans are usually opened to the public, and this could fatally damage the image of the companies only by the fact they are just inspected by the administration.

In spite of great impact of the administrative investigation, legal and legislative control systems are not enough. The existing laws manages administrative investigation through provisions of each individual law, without a general law. Each law usually doesn’t specify how to control investigation procedure and the abuse of investigation power.

This allows administrative investigation to be performed for admin- istrative convenience or political purposes. It is also a problem that the legal power of administrative investigation has a tendency to get stronger. In administrative investigation, the control system is not tight enough compared to criminal investigation. The Criminal Procedure Code regulates concretely from the start of the investigation to the final judgement of the court.

After foreign exchange crisis, the domestic and exterior watching mechanism to the companies such as the declaration reward system and group lawsuit system, was intensified drastically to enhance the business transparency. And the better condition which can help the ordinary inspecting system thanks the development of information technology have helped improve the investigation method, which has matured. However each government agency still follows former administrative investigation customs like a mass planning investigation.

The regulations coincide with the administrative investigation because some companies regulated by them feel the regulation intensities greatly when administrative investigation are performed willfully or repetitively no matter how much the regulations are reduced. Despite of this close relation, there are few studies about administrative investigation which approach issues from the view of the regulatory reform. The academic world of public law has had an interest in due process of the administrative operation.

This study is based on searching for alternatives to improve the effect of the regulatory reform through system improvement concerning administrative investigation. This study can be seen as a first attempt focusing the administrative investigation in the view of regulatory reform. Under the relation of administrative investigation and regulatory reform, it analyzes the actual conditions and problems of administrative investigation, and suggests improvement plans. Especially, it puts an emphasis on searching for substantial alternatives to improve the system and customs of administrative investigation.