JAPAN: Pension Woes May Never Be Solved, Says Report

Sampling finds 38.5% of records can't be Identified TOKYO (The Japan Times - Kyodo News), November 1, 2007: The government task force assigned to resolve the public pension record debacle concluded Wednesday it would be hard to identify 38.5 percent of the owners of the 50 million scrambled pension accounts. The panel, headed by former prosecutor general Kunihiro Matsuo, presented the figure in its final report on the massive record-keeping blunder to Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Hiroya Masuda. The figure was based on a sample survey of the accounts that traced most of the identification problems to data-inputting errors and surname changes following marriage, the report says. Most of the blame for the fiasco belongs to the former heads of the Social Insurance Agency and former welfare ministers, the report says. No individuals were named. The sample survey was conducted by cross-referencing 7,840 randomly selected accounts with data on Juki Net, the resident registry network. The test run found that 33.6 percent of the mystery accounts were identifiable, and that 27.9 percent belonged to deceased people, nonpensioners or those whose records have already been corrected. But the remaining 38.5 percent were deemed unidentifiable, meaning they will have to be determined by referencing registry books kept by each municipality nationwide. As for the cause of the problem, the report hits the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry and the Social Insurance Agency for lacking "the sense of responsibility to accurately manage pension records." (C) The Japan Times