Government ministries and agencies have overstated the rate at which they employ people with disabilities, prompting an investigation by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, it has been learned. Hiring quotas for people with disabilities are established by law.
Employees without disability certificates or medical certificates -- who are not classified as people with disabilities under Japanese law -- are believed to have been counted to calculate the employment rates.
The data padding has been done by multiple government bodies, including the labor ministry -- which itself is in charge of employment quotas for disabled persons -- the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry; and the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry, according to sources.
Some of the ministries and agencies are suspected of failing to reach the legally required employment rate. The labor ministry plans to publicly release the results of its probe soon.
The Law for Promotion of Employment of Persons with Disabilities requires companies and central and local governments to hire a certain percentage of people with disabilities.
Under the law, disabled persons are defined as those who are issued physical disability certificates, medical rehabilitation handbooks, mental disability certificates or doctor's medical certificates.
The mandatory employment rate for the central government was 2.3 percent until the end of March and was raised to 2.5 percent in April. The rate is set higher than that for private companies to demonstrate to the public the government's willingness to promote such employment.
However, some government bodies, including the labor ministry, are said to have inflated the rate at which they employ people with disabilities by counting employees without disability or medical certificates who have relatively minor disabilities.
According to the labor ministry, the average employment rate of people with disabilities among 33 central government entities was 2.49 percent as of June last year, when the legally required threshold was 2.3 percent. Some ministries and agencies would see their rates fall below 1 percent if employees not classified as disabled under the law were excluded.
The ministries and agencies apparently were unable to increase the rate at which they employed people with disabilities as steadily as required, largely due to a culture of long working hours. Falsifying the data by overcounting may have been commonplace, the sources said.
The government mandates that people with disabilities comprise at least 2.2 percent of all employees at private companies with over 45 employees, and requires such firms pay, in principle, a monthly fine of 50,000 yen multiplied by the number of employees by which they fall short of the threshold. It also sometimes discloses the names of companies that come up short. However, ministries and agencies only make public their employment rates of people with disabilities.
The labor ministry will likely face harsh criticism as more specifics on its inflating practices are revealed, as the ministry itself is conducting a survey on the employment of people with disabilities at each ministry and agency for 2017.
"We will swiftly confirm the facts and make them public," an official of the labor ministry's Employment Measures for Persons with Disabilities Division said.
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