Why Adoptees Will Likely Be Stuck With NCRC’s Woefully Inadequate Temporary Storage Facility For ALL Korean Adoption Agency Files In Gyeonggi-do.

Posted to Paperslip — July 4th, 2025.
Promoting Independence of Thought.
Thanks to a Paperslip Contributor for helping us to understand this issue.

Many Korean Adoptees know by now that ALL Korean Adoption Agency files will be transferred to the Korean Government Agency NCRC (National Center for the Rights of the Child) starting July 19th, 2025. We have been diligently following this topic and strongly warning KSS and other Adoptees about the coming file transfer to NCRC since March 11th, 2024, and have been the ONLY organization of any kind to consistently WARN Korean Adoptees about the file transfer to NCRC for the past 15 months — since we have quite frankly always known that the file transfer to NCRC would be a disaster.

We were the first to report on May 2nd, 2025 that NCRC had designated a new temporary storage facility for ALL Korean Adoption Agency files which it will take over in July:

“NCRC Secures Adoption Records Preservation Facility in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province”

A new Korean Adoptee activist group recently emerged and began posting to social media around June 12th, 2025 in response to growing concerns raised during a May 31st, 2025 meeting in Seoul—the meeting was organized by the Korean activist group Banet and featuring a key speaker: a whistleblower from the NCRC. During a recent trip to Korea, we ourselves spoke with other attendees of this Banet meeting almost immediately following the event in Seoul, and were thus made quickly aware of the issues which were raised by the NCRC whistleblower — specifically, that temperature issues in the cold storage building chosen by NCRC for the storage of ALL Korean Adoption Agency files were definitely not ideal for the storage of fragile, sometimes decades old paper adoption files. We had already reported on May 2nd, 2025 that the location of the Gyeonggi-do facility was an hour north of NCRC’s main office in Seoul and was difficult to reach, even by public transportation, so this information from the meeting was not news to us.

The pressing issue is the imminent transfer of ALL Korean Adoption Agency files to NCRC’s temporary storage facility starting on July 19th, 2025. Anyone would acknowledge that the location and conditions of NCRC’s temporary storage facility are far from ideal. The new activist group was hastily formed from a group of existing activists / supporters after the Banet meeting and is now actively calling on the Korean Government to secure a more suitable, long-term archival site for ALL Korean Adoption Agency records, which are legally set to be handed over to NCRC starting July 19th, 2025.

Here’s where we disagree with the new activists’ (late hour / over one year too late) approach.

First, we unfortunately don’t think that this new activist group is going to be listened to seriously by the Korean Government; and second, this new group may be focusing on the wrong pressure point.

While we were the first to report on and agree that the current temporary storage facility is inadequate—especially given its location nearly an hour north of NCRC’s Seoul headquarters, and its less than ideal temperature issues—our points may not align with the prevailing (and hastily assembled) narrative which the new activist group is rapidly promulgating amongst Korean Adoptees online.

To gain clarity on this issue, first it’s important to understand some recent history:

The original plan by NCRC for the file transfer back in July 2024 was to create an “Adoption Records Center” in Gimpo, but apparently failures and likely deliberate sleight of hand by NCRC and the Ministry of Health and Welfare conspired to squash this plan.

To understand this, you have to read the pages linked below. And you have to understand that the Korean Government is never just going to let Korean Adoptees easily win on their turf.

Originally posted to Paperslip in July 2024:

Construction of a New "Adoption Records Center" in Gimpo By 2029

“The (Korean) Ministry of Health and Welfare's request for a 4.8 billion won budget for an 'Adoption Records Center' has been rejected by the Ministry of Finance.”

This original Gimpo plan to create an “Adoption Records Center” should be the one to be pushed for currently by Adoptee activists — but NCRC and the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW) will forever use the excuse of lack of budget to make sure that this Gimpo plan does not come to fruition.

To help explain this complicated sleight of hand on behalf of NCRC and the MHW, a Paperslip Contributor writes:

“Without securing the land in Gimpo for the previously proposed “Adoption Records Center”, the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW) and NCRC cannot receive the funding to create the “Adoption Records Center”. While the Gimpo city government continues to wait, neither the MHW nor NCRC has taken any concrete action to acquire the land. Instead, they repeatedly claim that they cannot proceed with the original plan due to ‘budget constraints’. However, without the land, a proper budget cannot be allocated. As a result, the MHW and NCRC continue to issue misleading statements, and unfortunately, anyone (like the new activist group) who refers to the lack of budget as an excuse for not creating the originally proposed “Adoption Records Center” in Gimpo appears to be indirectly supporting this narrative.

What Adoptees don’t understand is that NCRC only needs to ask the Gimpo city government for the land, and NCRC doesn’t do that. This reason — rather than ‘budget constraints’ — is why the original Gimpo plan for the originally proposed “Adoption Records Center” cannot move forward.”

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*Cue our utter lack of shock that NCRC has once again deliberately and willfully failed Korean Adoptees.

Frankly, we knew from March 11th, 2024 when we first began to report on the transfer of ALL Korean Adoption Agency files to NCRC, that Korean Adoptees were screwed. We’ve had years of prior experience with NCRC up to the National Assembly level — and we’ve known for years that NCRC was willfully incompetent, and will forever use “lack of budget” as an eternal excuse for their perpetual failures. We’ve even been given this “lack of budget” excuse in person by a former Head of NCRC back in 2021 — they used this excuse to justify why NCRC had just 3 birth family search workers at the time (and during 2020, NCRC was down to just ONE birth family search worker to serve the needs of ALL Korean Adoptees around the WORLD). It is because of our knowledge of NCRC’s years of willful failures that we dedicated the past 15 months to making sure that as many KSS and other Adoptees as possible knew to request a birth family search and their adoption files BEFORE the file transfer to NCRC. We figured out long before anyone else did that the NCRC file transfer — for one reason or another — was going to be a disaster — and we became the ONLY organization to constantly WARN Adoptees about the coming file transfer for over one year:

Paperslip Concludes A 15 Month Campaign To Warn KSS Adoptees About The File Transfer To NCRC

Ironically, we were attending an Omma Poom event in Korea on June 13th, 2025, when—at the conclusion of a film screening—a member of the new activist group breathlessly informed Korean Adoptees in attendance about the new activist group’s recent efforts concerning the issues with NCRC’s temporary storage facility. This announcement came just as we were wrapping up our own 15-month campaign to warn KSS and the wider Korean Adoptee community about the impending NCRC file transfer, which we had long known would be a disaster. It's unfortunate that this new activist group never bothered to consult the one organization—Paperslip—that had been sounding the alarm from the very beginning. But this is down to Adoptee politics—since a non-Adoptee member of this new activist group previously attempted to accept false credit for our KSS K-Number research, and we called him on it publicly.

We’d love to believe that the NCRC file transfer will be easy and smooth — but unfortunately we’ve had enough past experience with NCRC to know better.

The bad but realistic news is that short of NCRC and the MHW moving forward on the land in Gimpo for the originally proposed “Adoption Records Center”, and the Korean Government magically coughing up the funds for the original Gimpo plan (which, spoiler alert, probably won't be happening) we unfortunately think Korean Adoptees are going to be stuck with the woefully inadequate Gyeonggi-do NCRC temporary storage facility we first reported on back on May 2nd, 2025 — potentially permanently.

But hey — prove us wrong.

But let’s at least be aware that the Korean Government isn’t stupid. It’s not as though they don’t know that Adoptees would infinitely prefer that our precious adoption files be eventually transferred to a purpose built “Adoption Records Center” in Gimpo, over a temporary cold storage facility in Gyeonggi-do, one hour north of NCRC’s main office in Seoul.

In closing — do you really believe the Korean Government will ever make it easy for Korean Adoptees to access information that a certain Danish Korean Adoptee activist in Korea, during the March 26th, 2025 press release event for the TRC2 interim report on Overseas Adoption, promised to use as evidence against the Korean Government and Korean Adoption Agencies in future lawsuits?

If you believe this, we have a *great* used car to sell to you…

What You Can Do.

No matter what happens, Korean Adoptees should take care to BACK UP in multiple formats the adoption paperwork they already have in their possession. This is ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT for those Adoptees who have birth parent information in their adoption documents. But this is ALSO IMPORTANT for ANY Korean Adoptees with any adoption paperwork at all. We cannot rely on NCRC to accurately be able to identify our adoption records in the future.

Please see:

Now More Than Ever, Safely Back Up Any Documents You Have Which Contain Birth Parent Information!

The Current State of Birth Family Search

DNA Testing

KSS (Korea Social Service) Adoptees Please See:

NEW! Step By Step KSS (Korea Social Service) Adoptee Birth Family Search