Health and welfare minister Mr. Norihisa Tamura has decided to establish a new committee under the Social Security Council to resolve the problem of identifying millions of public pension account holders. He said that the goal of the committee is to finish identifying the account holders by the end of March 2014. The committee should continue to work even after the deadline because the problem is likely to remain for a long time to come.
The sloppy handling of records of pension premium payments by the now-defunct Social Insurance Agency became a big issue in the Diet in 2007. Mr. Akira Nagatsuma, a Democratic Party of Japan member of the Lower House, played an important role in digging out the problem. It became known that there were 50.95 million cases in which it was impossible to determine who paid pension premiums.
When the DPJ came to power in 2009 and Mr. Nagatsuma became health and welfare minister, he created under him a committee to tackle the problem. But under the Abe administration, which took power from the DPJ in the Dec. 16 Lower House election, the committee was disbanded on the grounds that it had no legal footing. In place of this committee, Mr. Tamura established the new committee.