The land ministry on Friday punished 10 officials in connection with a decades-long rewriting of statistics that may have led the country's gross domestic product figures to be miscalculated.
Vice Minister Kunihiro Yamada and nine other officials received punishments such as pay cuts and reprimands, while land minister Tetsuo Saito will voluntarily return four months pay as well as a bonus.
For over 20 years, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism had rewritten or overstated data when compiling its monthly construction orders, according to findings of the third-party panel that investigated the matter.
The practice "was extremely regrettable and the response to the problem when it came to light was also abominable," Saito said in a news conference on Friday.
The panel said in its Jan. 14 report that several ministry officials in 2019 urged their bosses to stop the rewriting or report it to the internal affairs ministry, but that the superiors were reluctant to address the issue.
The monthly construction orders, one of 53 key economic figures compiled by the government, are calculated using data submitted every month from about 12,000 businesses. They are used to compile the country's GDP and influence policy-making of the government as well as management decisions of businesses.
At the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry, which oversees the statistics law, seven officials including Vice Minister Buichiro Kuroda were admonished.
Internal affairs minister Yasushi Kaneko said he will request a statistics commission to review how data are collected in all 53 sections.