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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Shin Ha-kyun, Jin Goo, Lee Jeong-ha
Latest Nielsen rating: 5.9 per cent
Shin Ha-kyun (Beyond Evil) suits up to tackle corporate corruption in sharp workplace thriller The Auditors, which focuses on a reshuffled audit team that seeks to clean up a company from the inside.
The Korean title of the series (Kamsahamnida), which is a pun that means both “to audit” and “thank you”, alludes to the story’s playful exploration of where the line between sticking to the rule book and being guided by your emotions falls.


Shin plays a character on the rule-following side of that ideological divide, Shin Cha-il, a steely-eyed corporate auditor who joins companies to rid them of their “rats” and then swiftly moves on to the next job.
After cracking down on embezzlement in one company, he moves on to JU Construction, which has been dealing with a near-fatal workplace accident.
As though chiselled in stone, Cha-il’s perpetually scowling face remains rigid and unsmiling, and scarcely registers the least bit of emotion. The only emotion visible through the veneer is fear; memories of a past trauma manifest themselves in the occasional panic attacks that paralyse him.
On the emotional side of that divide is the idealistic Goo Han-soo (Lee Jeong-ha, Moving), a new member of the audit team at JU Construction. Naive and starry-eyed, Han-soo blindly follows anyone who shows him the least bit of kindness.

This puts him at odds with Cha-il the moment the latter takes over as audit team leader. Viewing his young team member’s trusting personality as a hindrance, he tells him that he will soon be transferred to another department.
Han-soo isn’t the only person Cha-il rubs up the wrong way at the company. During his surprisingly candid job interview with the young JU chairman, Hwang Se-woong (Jung Moon-sung, Divorce Attorney Shin), and two other directors, Cha-il exclaims that the company is overrun with rats and he intends to eradicate them.
While his colleagues take umbrage at Cha-il’s arrogant proclamation, Se-woong appears to agree with Cha-il and hands him the job.
Cha-il also gets on the wrong side of Se-woong’s brother Hwang Dae-woong (Jin Goo, Descendants of the Sun), the vice-president of the company, who oozes entitlement and corruption the moment he steps into the picture.

A blend of workplace, procedural and legal drama, The Auditors is undemanding and effortlessly entertaining prime-time fare. While the chaebol (Korean family-run corporation) angle in K-dramas is starting to get a little stale in 2024, a year that has been overrun by series set around chaebol, the show’s scope is refreshingly narrow.
The first two episodes are more or less limited to the company and its various components and a few subcontractors they work with, with an occasional glimpse of Dae-woong’s home life: he lives with his parents.
While Cha-il’s rigid interpretation of corporate guidance is extremely effective in ferreting out problematic individuals, his inflexibility and total lack of people skills puts him in danger of condemning the wrong people, or at least not taking into account their varying motivations.
On the other hand, Han-soo, with his trusting nature, is credulous to the point of seemingly being unable to make his own decisions if confronted with the least bit of kindness.

Even though he is on the audit team, he does not seem to recognise the hypocrisy of using company credit cards for nice dinners and cab rides or receiving gifts from department directors the team has helped.
He also fails to recognise the problematic behaviour of his disgruntled superior, who is passed over for the team leader post.
Making great use of its front-and-centre star, the show benefits from Shin’s magnetism. Staring down colleagues and targets alike with the same unshakeable intensity, Cha-il stalks the corridors of JU with purpose.
Meanwhile, rising star Lee adds to the dramatic stakes with his portrayal of Han-soo’s earnestness and naked emotionality.
Playing the villain of the piece, Jin as Dae-woong is all swagger for the moment, while Jo A-ram, formerly of K-pop girl group Gugudan, is gearing up to play a bigger part in the series as Han-soo’s stern colleague Yoon Seo-jin, who has a secret of her own.
Beginning with a relatively simple case that hints at the widespread corruption within JU, The Auditors ably sets up its characters, their motivations and the environment they work in.

With 10 episodes to go, there is plenty of time for the stakes to rise, although hopefully, like the best Korean workplace dramas, such as On the Verge of Insanity and Misaeng: Incomplete Life, it will remain focused and resist the temptation to stretch too far beyond JU.
The Auditors is streaming on Viu.


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Shin Ha-kyun as auditor Shin Cha-il in a still from K-drama The Auditors.

Shin Ha-kyun as by-the-book corporate auditor Shin Cha-il in a still from Korean drama series The Auditors.

Lee Jeong-ha as Goo Han-soo in a still from The Auditors.

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A thriller about auditors tackling corporate graft, this drama pits Shin Ha-kyun’s by-the-book auditor against Jin Goo’s corrupt executive


A personality clash between auditors played by Shin Ha-kyun and Lee Jeong-ha as they root out corruption at a construction firm is the starting point for this entertaining Korean drama series.


K-drama The Auditors: Shin Ha-kyun glowers through entertaining workplace corruption drama

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}A thriller about auditors tackling corporate graft, this drama pits Shin Ha-kyun’s by-the-book auditor against Jin Goo’s corrupt executive

A thriller about auditors tackling corporate graft, this drama pits Shin Ha-kyun’s by-the-book auditor against Jin Goo’s corrupt executive