A final report by the internal affairs ministry panel investigating pension record-keeping problems shows how sloppy the Social Insurance Agency's operation has been. The government must strive to win back people's trust in the nation's pension system. Time is pressing because the SIA will be abolished in 2010 and its jobs will be taken over by a new entity.

The pension-record debacle centers on the SIA's inability to identify roughly 50.95 million pension premium-payment records. The government is trying to straighten out the problem by next March. By cross-referencing 7,840 randomly selected premium payment records with data on the Juki Net resident registry network, the panel concluded that it will be hard to identify people who made payments in 38.5 percent of the 50.95 million cases. The report says that most identification problems are due to errors made during data inputting and to surname changes following marriage.

Most importantly, the report says the welfare ministry and the SIA, which is under the ministry, decidedly lacked a sense of duty and responsibility for correctly making and maintaining the pension-related records for a long time. It pointed out that the SIA failed to take necessary corrective measures each time it changed its system of keeping records. Although many SIA workers suspected there were errors in the records, they and the SIA management did not take concrete action, the report said. Welfare ministry and SIA officials must recognize the gravity of the accusations leveled against them.