The revelation that the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry has long been using improper methods to collect wage and other data in the Monthly Labor Survey has shaken public trust in official statistics released by the government, which serve as a guide for its policy formulation and various economic activities.
The inadequately collected data made the average wage appear lower than it actually was, resulting in the underpayment of unemployment insurance benefits — calculated on the basis of the wage level in the labor report — by more than ¥50 billion to roughly 19 million people. That has forced the government to rework its fiscal 2019 budget to include expenses to retroactively compensate for the past underpayment of benefits, a massive task given the huge number of people affected. The government is also said to be considering revising downward its data on inflation-adjusted net growth in people's wages after recalculating the data to reflect the findings.
But the labor data fiasco does not appear to end there. A "third party" probe by a committee of lawyers and statisticians of the fiasco, which wrapped up in just about a week after the revelation last month, concluded that there was no organized attempts by the ministry to cover up the improper data collection, while punishing 22 senior ministry officials, including some who had already retired, over the fiasco. It later turned out, however, that the hearings of the ministry officials involved in the data collection by the committee were also attended by the ministry's senior bureaucrats, who questioned the officials during the hearings. All in all, roughly 70 percent of the hearings of the ministry officials involved were reportedly conducted by their fellow ministry bureaucrats alone — casting doubts on the independence of the committee's probe.