The labor ministry released on Wednesday corrected personal income statistics going back to 2012, after the discovery of sampling irregularities stretching back nearly 15 years that had resulted in benefits and compensation to some 20 million people going underpaid.
After correcting the labor survey data for the years still held by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, monthly average cash earnings per person were raised by up to 1.2 percentage points.
The ministry said records from 2004 to 2011 had been discarded because it was not required to keep them, but its own committee charged with probing the issue said that these should have been retained under laws relating to statistics and public record management.