Japan sorry for false disability figures

THE Japanese government yesterday apologized for routinely overstating the number of disabled people it employed to meet legal quotas in a “highly regrettable” scandal.

Thousands of able-bodied employees at 27 ministries and government agencies were wrongly counted as disabled, Tokyo admitted.

“We deeply apologize for something that should not have happened to the government, which has a responsibility to secure and stabilize employment of people with disabilities,” a government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said.

He announced the creation of a working group headed by the labor ministry to investigate how the disabled employment figures were padded and urged regional authorities to conduct similar probes.

Health Minister Katsunobu Kato said thousands of people were wrongly counted as having disabilities. In one example, a person with diabetes was counted toward the quota. When the figures were revised, the ratio of government employees with disabilities dropped from 2.49 percent to 1.19 percent. Last fiscal year, Japan set a hiring quota in government ministries of at least 2.3 percent, with a quota of 2.0 percent for the private sector.

“We will make efforts to meet the legal requirement this year. But if that becomes difficult, we will draft a plan to achieve the goal next year, as the law requires us to do,” Kato said.

The situation is “highly regrettable,” Kato added.

The Japan Council on Disability, which represents people with disabilities, said the scandal had caused an “immeasurable shockwave.”

“This implies that deep down the government as a whole is hoping not to hire disabled workers. This is discrimination against impaired people,” the group said.

Internal affairs minister Seiko Noda, whose son has disabilities, said, “I was extremely shocked to hear that such a thing was happening, even though I don’t know the exact number.

“Speaking as the mother of a disabled child, not as the internal affairs minister, this is something I cannot allow.”