The existence of some 50 million hard-to-identify pension-premium payment records surfaced in 2007. Then, in 2008, the tampering of records related to Kosei Nenkin (pension system mainly for company employees) surfaced. Progress in rectifying the situation is slow.
Even if one succeeds in having his or her pension records corrected, it takes an average nine months to receive the correct pension amount. The government needs to assign workers knowledgeable in the task of correcting pension records at the Social Insurance Operations Center in Tokyo, which manages pension records, and to increase the number of such workers.
Local social insurance offices receive applications for correcting pension records, process the applications and send them to the operations center. This takes about two months. Then it takes another seven months or so for corrections to be made at the operations center and for the correct pension payouts to start. The Social Insurance Agency explains that even if local social insurance offices accept the requests for correcting pension records as justified, some cases require the offices to contact other local social insurance offices and get necessary information.