The Bank of Japan said Thursday it will penalize two officials responsible for financial market statistics for failing to correct errors concerning the outstanding balance of commercial papers issued last year.

Due to the failure, the central bank has found that the balance as of March 31 was actually 11.9 trillion yen -- almost half the 22.1 trillion yen it announced earlier.

BOJ Gov. Toshihiko Fukui released a statement apologizing both for the errors and the failure to rectify them. He pledged to prevent any such recurrence in the future.