Nearly 22 percent of government offices were targets of some form of outside coercion during the year spanning August 2004 to last July, with at least 8.6 percent pressured into buying merchandise, subscribing to publications or making donations, the National Police Agency said Thursday.
The government, concerned that some offices have yielded to such coercion, will convene a meeting of ministries and agencies on Oct. 13 to eradicate the practice.
The agency said the figures come from an August survey of central government offices nationwide.
Questionnaires were sent to 4,285 government offices, with 3,790 providing valid responses. It was the second such survey ever taken.
The survey shows that 831 government offices experienced coercion in the yearlong period, compared with 1,030 in the previous year, when the survey was first conducted.
It indicates that 594 offices had experienced coercion during the latest year only, down from 772 in 2003.
Those falsely claiming to be associations representing members of a group of former social outcasts accounted for 45.6 percent of the apparent extortionists, followed by pseudo-rightwingers, at 39.4 percent, and gangsters, at 3.4 percent, the survey shows.
Coercive tactics were used to peddle merchandise in 33.5 percent of cases, while similar strategies were used to demand subscriptions to publications in 30.5 percent of cases.
Over the past year, 51 government offices gave in to such tactics in one way or another compared with 110 offices in 2003, according to the survey.
In a multiple-choice question section, more than half of those who gave in said they had done so because they had found it difficult to refuse the demands in question.
Nearly 30 percent said they had given in because the amount of money involved was small, while the same proportion cited a lack of experience in such matters.