An additional 223,000 households have elected to no longer pay their NHK fees since the end of March, the public broadcaster announced Thursday.

The number of households that stopped paying subscription fees to scandal-tainted NHK soared to about 970,000 at the end of May, up from approximately 747,000 in March, President Genichi Hashimoto said Thursday.

The number of nonpaying households is almost double the 450,000-500,000 forecast by the public broadcaster in January, when the figures was only about 397,000.

Hashimoto told a news conference that the people who have recently stopped paying said it was because it was unfair that they had been paying when many of their neighbors were not.

NHK previously forecast the total fees collected in fiscal 2005 would shrink by 7.2 billion yen.

But the figure might reach 11.7 billion yen with the rise in the number of households that have stopped paying, according to the broadcaster.

NHK has been hurt by number of scandals recently, in particular the discovery in July that a former producer had embezzling money from NHK. Katsumi Isono and event planner Hisayuki Uehara pleaded guilty March 9 before the Tokyo District Court to conspiring to embezzle 19 million yen.

The public broadcaster had a total of 38.2 million paying households as of March 31, 2004.