Government Panel Backs Revised Pensions in 15 cases

By Yomiuri Shimbun

Japan

July 14, 2007

In connection with the pension record-keeping errors by the Social Insurance Agency, a government-appointed panel to decide whether pension subscribers' applications to have their pension payments revised upward without providing concrete proof, such as receipts, of premium payments concluded Friday that the agency should correct pension records in 15 such cases.

It was the first time the panel has revealed specific examples of standards it will apply to correct pension records. The panel, set up late last month, is headed by former Japan Federation of Bar Associations Chairman Go Kajitani.

The applicants who sought to have their pension records revised will soon be notified of the panel's instruction to the agency, which will be handed to SIA Director General Kiyoshi Murase on Tuesday. In response to the instruction, the SIA is expected to revise the records in accordance with the applicants' claims.

At the panel's meeting Friday, its members discussed 12 cases in which the issue was whether premiums for the national pension were appropriately paid; two cases concerning whether premiums were paid through the pension system's exceptional, retroactive "window period" system; and a case in which there was a disagreement between a pension subscriber and the SIA over the period in which premiums were paid for the subscriber's corporate employees pension plan.

In one case among the 15, a married couple claimed that they had both paid premiums for the national pension plan, but the payment record of one of the two had gone missing. In another case, a person claimed to have paid premiums without fail for 40 years, but according to the SIA's records, payment was not made for four months during that period.

The panel also admitted a detailed household account book as proof of a person's premium payment. The 15 cases will be used as concrete examples at 50 local committees across the country to determine whether people's claims to have paid premiums should be accepted if official records have been misplaced by the SIA. The committees will begin receiving correction requests Tuesday.

Of the 284 cases in which people claim they paid premiums although the SIA can find no record of payment and the subscribers cannot provide proof to back their claims, the 15 cases were chosen as they agreed to have their cases discussed by the panel.

The panel said in all of the 15 cases, the pension records should be corrected, although an SIA in-house committee earlier concluded that correction would not be required in two of the 15 cases.

The panel's guideline, released Monday, says people's claims to have paid pension premiums without tangible proof will be accepted provided their claims are "not deemed unreasonable in light of common sense and seem certain."

The Social Insurance Agency, which has been rocked by pension record-keeping blunders, recorded more than 1,000 irregularities, including accidents and errors, at social insurance offices nationwide in fiscal 2006 alone, 2.5 times higher than the previous year, it was learned Friday.

The agency started to disclose irregularities committed by its workers in fiscal 2007. However, the agency is also working on confirming other problems--as some agency offices apparently failed to properly write incident reports--and it has not decided when to disclose further information.

According to internal agency documents, a total of 407 irregularities were reported in fiscal 2005, including 53 termed "mishaps and incidents" and 354 "business transaction errors." Among the mishaps and incidents, three were misappropriations of corporate employee- and national-pension premiums by its workers, while in other cases, the head of a pension consulting center viewed personal information on pensioners just out of curiosity. The number of such problems that occurred in fiscal 2006 has already exceeded 1,000, the agency said.
 

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