Asahi Shimbun Co. said Tuesday it failed to declare about 1.18 billion yen in taxable income during the seven years through March 2004 due to inappropriate accounting.
The Asahi Shimbun said in its Tuesday morning edition that the Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau notified the Tokyo-based publisher of the failure and slapped it with 382 million yen in penalties and taxes.
"We have had conflicting views with the taxation bureau, but we take seriously its pointing out our failure to file for taxes," the publisher's public relations office said.
Of the 1.18 billion yen, the publisher initially wrote off 791 million yen in personnel expenses for the development of editing and other computer systems in fiscal 2002 and 2003 as nontaxable expenses, although it was required to book it as software, an intangible fixed asset subject to tax, it said.
The company said its Nagoya headquarters initially logged 39 million yen as nontaxable sales expenses in the six-year period through March 2003. But the tax bureau found that the money should have been booked as taxable entertainment expenses because it was used for entertainment purposes.