Another example of sloppy work by the Social Insurance Agency has come to the fore. Sampling of pension-related records on original paper registers and in computers shows errors in 1.4 percent of matched records that relate to pensions for company-employed workers or kosei nenkin. As health and welfare minister Yoichi Masuzoe said, an error rate of more than 1 percent is "large" and demonstrates shoddy management of records.
It was reported to Cabinet ministers in charge of pension-related matters that information on 277 of about 20,000 sampled original records in paper registers did not mach the information in corresponding computer records. These 277 records represent 1.4 percent of the sampled records. If this rate is applied to some 400 million kosei nenkin-related paper records, about 5.6 million computer records would be expected to contain errors. In 48 of the 277 cases, no information on paper records was transferred to computers.
Paper registers were used until around the mid-1980s. Most of the paper records have been input into computers. But during the inputting process, errors occurred concerning pension system participants' names, birth dates, salary levels and dates of their joining and leaving the pension system. In 11 cases, paper registers were illegible.