Diet, National Library, Courts Pad Number of Disabled Workers by 430

September 7, 2018

Tokyo- The total number of disabled workers overstated by the upper and lower chambers of the Diet, the National Diet Library and courts across the nation stood at 436.5 as of June 1 last year, the labor ministry said Friday.

The ministry announced the results of a survey targeting those organizations, conducted in the wake of the revelation of a flurry of manipulations regarding the number of disabled workers at government entities. Employees working for short hours were each counted as 0.5 in the probe.

The combined number of disabled workers falsely counted by the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of parliament, the House of Councillors, the upper chamber, and the national library came to 37.5, and the courts manipulated their numbers by 399.

The actual proportion of disabled workers at the Diet chambers and the library stood at 1.31 pct, while the share at the courts came to 0.97 pct, both below the legal standard of 2.3 pct. The entities earlier stated that they had met the standard.

The government announced in late August that 27 of 33 state entities padded the number of disabled workers by 3,460 in total as of the beginning of June 2017.

To investigate the matter, the labor ministry set up on Friday a committee comprising lawyers, including Gan Matsui, former chief prosecutor at the Fukuoka High Public Prosecutors Office.

Noting that the manipulations at the Diet chambers, the library and the courts was "deeply regrettable," labor minister Katsunobu Kato told a press conference that the ministry will instruct 337 other state-linked institutions, including universities and independent administrative agencies, to check whether they have exaggerated the number of workers with disabilities. Jiji Press