The Gifu Prefectural Government in central Japan has been rocked by a scandal involving, in a sense, all of the prefectural government and its workers. It came to light earlier this month that the prefecture had systematically generated, hid and used a large amount of off-the-book funds over many years. There are strong indications that this kind of practice has been carried out by the central government and other local administrations, too. Thorough scrutiny and investigations are called for.

A monthlong internal examination has found that various sections of the Gifu government had squirreled away as much as 466 million yen in off-the-book funds by fiscal 1994 -- a peak year. Prefectural government workers generated the funds by claiming compensation from prefectural coffers for fictitious business trips, taxi fares, and official meetings accompanied by wining and dining. The money "saved" was then used for purposes such as wining and dining public servants from other organizations, parties for high-ranking prefectural government officials and monetary offerings for weddings and funerals of prefectural government workers.

The egregious aspect of the existence of these slush funds is that high-ranking officials were aware of them and were actively involved in hiding them. Mr. Tsuneo Morimoto, a former bureaucrat of the now-defunct Home Affairs Ministry who served as Gifu vice governor from 1996 to 1999 (now a Liberal Democratic Party member of the Upper House), instructed various sections of the prefectural government to transfer some of the funds into bank accounts of the prefectural government workers' union, as it was feared that a large-scale organizational shakeup in the prefectural government, scheduled for fiscal 1999, might lead to disclosure of the funds.