Ministries and agencies "arbitrarily interpreted" guidelines for employing disabled people and counted people who were retired or even dead among their numbers in an attempt to meet legal quotas, an investigative panel said Monday.
The committee of lawyers and other experts tasked with looking into the data falsification concluded that such "sloppy handling" had occurred for decades in some cases.
The government has said the percentage of people with disabilities in national office workforces as of June last year was actually 1.17 percent, instead of the 2.50 percent figure previously announced. Japanese law requires public institutions to meet the 2.5 percent quota, while the quota for the private sector is set at 2.2 percent.