The government has failed to pay tens of billions of yen in benefits such as unemployment insurance, affecting about 10 million people, due to the labor ministry's publishing of faulty jobs data for the past 15 years, sources with knowledge of the matter said Thursday.

The ministry is considering retroactively paying the benefits, which would likely require the budget for the year beginning in April to be reworked to include the additional costs, the sources said.

On Tuesday, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare admitted that it had published the revised October edition of its monthly labor survey despite knowing that it had not collected enough data to ensure its accuracy.