Welfare minister Akira Nagatsuma will request ¥200 billion in the fiscal 2010 budget to fix the pension record disaster, up sevenfold from the ¥28.4 billion earmarked in the initial budget for fiscal 2009, sources said Wednesday.
The request will be included in the budget that the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry submits to the Finance Ministry on Oct. 15 as part of a budget review ordered by the administration of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama in late September.
Nagatsuma hopes the new budget request will enable the welfare ministry to speed up its cross-checking of about 850 million paper records against computerized files, and to re-examine some 50 million cases of lost pension records.