Another example of sloppy work by the Social Insurance Agency has come to the fore. Sampling of pension-related records on original paper registers and in computers shows errors in 1.4 percent of matched records that relate to pensions for company-employed workers or kosei nenkin. As health and welfare minister Yoichi Masuzoe said, an error rate of more than 1 percent is “large” and demonstrates shoddy management of records.
It was reported to Cabinet ministers in charge of pension-related matters that information on 277 of about 20,000 sampled original records in paper registers did not mach the information in corresponding computer records. These 277 records represent 1.4 percent of the sampled records. If this rate is applied to some 400 million kosei nenkin-related paper records, about 5.6 million computer records would be expected to contain errors. In 48 of the 277 cases, no information on paper records was transferred to computers.
Paper registers were used until around the mid-1980s. Most of the paper records have been input into computers. But during the inputting process, errors occurred concerning pension system participants’ names, birth dates, salary levels and dates of their joining and leaving the pension system. In 11 cases, paper registers were illegible.
The agency plans to turn information on paper records into digitalized image data in fiscal 2008 and to make corrections in fiscal 2010 and 2011 if there are requests from citizens. This two-year task is expected to cost ¥14 billion to ¥18 billion. The question is how one can know whether errors were input or not. “Special pension-related letters” now being mailed from the agency to pensioners and participants in pension systems do not mention their past salary levels although they do show when they paid pension premiums.
In an earlier pension-related problem, 19.34 million of some 50 million pension premiums payment records still need to be identified. The government should take seriously its promise of paying pensions correctly to every last person.