Liberal Japan

Here is a good piece from the Japan Times about the current problems with the pension fund.

Are SIA workers the pension scapegoat?
Finger-pointing abounds among politicians, bureaucrats, pensioners


Naoyuki Haga, chief secretary of the Social Insurance Agency employee union, fears he and many of his coworkers will lose their jobs when a new government-backed corporation begins handling pension payments in 2010 and the SIA is closed down.

As well they should.

Haga and his colleagues have also become easy targets of criticism for the fiasco involving some 50 million unidentified pension premium payment records. They have been slammed by the media, pension recipients and politicians for sloppy handling of data.
“We are booed and branded as slackers even though in reality many are working very hard to help improve the situation. And yet we have to face the fear of losing our jobs,” Haga said. “Can you imagine working under such conditions?”

I’m sorry, maybe I should, but I don’t feel sorry for these people.

In recent weeks, the media have reported accounts by anonymous former SIA employees claiming the agency cut corners and employees embezzled money paid in as premium payments.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, desperate to keep his scandal-ridden Cabinet afloat ahead of the July 29 Upper House election, has also lashed out at the SIA’s ranks, saying their protected status as public servants led to their laxity — one reason for creating the new body to handle the public pension fund.

I guess I haven’t followed this issue closely enough. Why is forming a new body better than reforming the old one?

An investigative panel of the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry is probing to determine the root of the problem and who was responsible for the fiasco. But critics say the pension system has been mismanaged for decades under a less than watchful eye by lawmakers. The record debacle has only recently drawn public outrage, after it was revealed by the Democratic Party of Japan.
“(Bureaucrats) created the pension system from the beginning in order to create ‘amakudari’ organizations” where they can land lucrative jobs after they retire, including the cost-ineffective Greenpia resorts, said journalist Tatsuya Iwase, who has written two books on pension problems, one in 2003 and the other in 2004.

This seems to say it all, doesn’t it? The politicians were not concerned about the people. Government should not be involved in this type of thing. it breeds corruption on a massive scale. If it’s not already, it should be unconstitutional.

Takeo Hanazawa, who was a section chief between 1942 and 1945 in the old Health and Welfare Ministry’s pension bureau, recounts in a book edited by a welfare ministry-affiliated organization and published in 1988 that after the Employees Pension Insurance System for salaried workers was created in 1944, bureaucrats felt an overriding sense of power.
“(The pension fund) has trillions of, yen so even first-class banks cannot match it,” he said in the book. “(We) can create foundations such as an employees pension insurance fund, and top officials (of such organizations) have power equivalent to that of the Bank of Japan governor. After welfare ministry officials retire, they would have no difficulty finding jobs. (This could) secure (jobs for) thousands of people.”

That about says it all. Read the rest of the article!