TOKYO, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday approved a draft budget for fiscal 2019 that was amended to incorporate missing costs resulting from the release of faulty jobs data from the labor ministry.
The general-account budget, already approved by the cabinet in December, had to be revised to incorporate an additional 650 million yen (6 million U.S. dollars) to the already record-high 101.46 trillion yen (926 billion U.S. dollars) allocation.
The additional costs added to the general-account budget were a result of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare over the past 15 years not collecting the requisite amount of labor-related data.
The release of faulty jobs and wage data spanning a period of a decade or more, has resulted in more than 20 million people not receiving their full benefits.
The scandal has implicated top bureaucrats and officials in the ministry who knowingly and systematically covered up the improper method for collecting the data, which serves as a recognized barometer of the nation's employment situation.
Specifically, the ministry was revealed to have published key data collected from only a third of the 1,400 companies required to be surveyed in Tokyo since 2004.
The ministry is supposed to survey all businesses with employees totaling at least 500 people to compile its official Monthly Labor Survey.
The improper method used for data collection has led to the government being forced to revise the state budget for fiscal 2019 and address the fact that unemployment insurance and workers' compensation in some fields, applicable to 20.15 million people with up to 56 billion yen (511 million U.S. dollars), has gone unpaid.
"Government statistics are the basis for economic and fiscal policy and should be accurate. It's truly regrettable that the labor survey had to be corrected," Finance Minister Taro Aso, whose ministry had to rework the budget following the scandal, told a press briefing following a cabinet meeting Friday.
The 20.15 million affected people as a result of the scandal will be reimbursed from a special-account budget, the government has said.
To make up the shortfall, the government has upped its issuance of new bonds by some 700 million yen to 32.66 trillion yen (298 billion U.S. dollars).
A day earlier, the labor ministry convened a meeting comprised of lawyers and statisticians to confirm that top bureaucrats at the ministry knowingly and systematically covered up the improper method for collecting the data.
Government sources have said that some top bureaucrats and other ministry-linked officials will be reprimanded over what has been referred to as the systematic practice of referring to a manual mandating a "diluted method" of gathering data available inside the ministry.
Such a practice has almost certainly led to the years of faulty data being collected and released, sources with knowledge of the matter have said.
Vice Labor Minister Toshihiko Suzuki and others involved in the wrongdoing will be reprimanded as early as Friday, sources close to the matter also said.
