Employment associations misused 220 million yen
Written by Writer on Thursday, October 30th, 2008
Employment associations ‘misused 220 million yen’
The Yomiuri Shimbun
The Board of Audit has found that employment associations in 29 prefectures misused about 110 million yen that was paid by the Japan Organization for Employment of the Elderly and Persons with Disabilities (JEED), as fees for carrying out its operations over an eight-year period until fiscal 2007, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.
According to sources, an audit by the board revealed that the public bodies had spent the money provided by JEED for dining, fraudulent business trips and other purposes.
In a probe conducted last fiscal year, the board also uncovered the misuse of about 110 million yen by employment bodies in another 18 prefectures.
This means such misappropriations were found in all 47 prefectures.
Fees for work undertaken by the employment bodies are funded mainly with subsidies the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry pays to the Minato Ward, Tokyo-based public corporation.
The employment associations are under the umbrella of JEED.
The Board of Audit plans to ask the ministry and JEED to ensure the misuse of funds is halted, the sources said.
Each fiscal year, the ministry provides JEED with about 50 billion yen, of which about 7 billion yen is distributed to the public corporation’s subordinate employment bodies across the nation.
The money is intended to cover administration costs and the cost of holding consulting events and lectures on employment of the elderly and disabled.
The sources said that this fiscal year, the board dispatched its investigators to associations in 29 prefectures and checked accounting documents from fiscal 2000 to fiscal 2007. It found irregularities in all 29 prefectures.
The sources said almost half the associations probed had misused the state subsidies for private dining, while others used the money to create off-the-book funds by claiming expenses for fake business trips, the fictitious employment of temporary workers and by fabricating the number of working days performed by their employees.
In addition, more than one of the bodies were found to have pooled funds by placing fictitious orders for goods and asking companies to pool the money they paid to them.
(Oct. 29, 2008)
