Editorial
Exploiting welfare recipients to pocket benefits is disgraceful
There has been a rise in private organizations aiming to help people get back on their feet by providing rooms to the needy for free or at a low price -- because without a home address, one cannot receive welfare benefits or look for employment.
Such aid organizations are considered class 2 social welfare organizations under Japan's Social Welfare Law, and can be run by volunteer groups and individuals without any special licenses. As of 2008, there were 415 such facilities nationwide with approximately 13,000 residents.
An organization that runs 18 facilities in the Tokyo metropolitan area and Aichi Prefecture collects 90,000 yen of the 120,000-yen monthly welfare payments residents receive from local governments, allocating the funds to food and labor expenses. Aside from these costs, however, about 30 percent of the organization's expenses are unexplained "operational expenses" said to be about 300 to 400 million yen per year. It would be a major scandal if the organization is found to be misappropriating the money meant to encourage people's self-reliance. But as a volunteer group, the organization is not legally obligated to report its income and expenditures to prefectural governments, so none of the municipal governments have a clear grasp of the actual situation.
Another volunteer organization providing apartments to homeless people in the city of Chiba was found to be holding on to residents' bank books and making residents apply for welfare benefits, the majority of which the group collected. This group had not even registered with the local city government.
In Nara Prefecture, the director and staff of Yamamoto Hospital in Yamato-Koriyama were arrested and indicted after they claimed insurance fees for heart surgeries on patients on welfare that were never performed. About 60 percent of the hospital's in-patients are welfare recipients, and the hospital is said to have wrongfully collected up to 8.3 million yen between 2005 and 2007. Medical costs incurred by welfare recipients are paid for entirely by government subsidies, guaranteeing that hospitals receive payment. Yamamoto Hospital is said to have visited apartments for welfare recipients to persuade them to be hospitalized.
In August, Japan's unemployment rate was 5.5 percent at 3.61 million people, 890,000 more people than the same month the previous year. The number of households on welfare has flared to 1.6 million, with the total amount of welfare payments made in fiscal 2007 reaching 2.62 trillion yen. Organizations have honed in on the vast amounts of public funds being allocated to social welfare to engage in malicious activities that could be called nothing but the pocketing of welfare benefits as kickbacks. Exploiting patients to receive welfare benefits for fictional operations is despicable.
As one cannot rent housing without guarantors and safety deposits, social welfare offices often refer people who have lost their jobs or homes to free or inexpensive lodgings when granting them approval to receive welfare payments. While the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has launched a full-scale investigation, there has been criticism of the back-scratching relationship between local governments who leave the job of getting the homeless to apply for welfare benefits to private organizations, as local governments refrain from interfering in how those organizations are run. There is a need for fundamental change including stringent oversight of these organizations, as in a shift from a "notification" system that leaves it up to organizations to notify local governments of their activities, to an "approval" system in which groups will not be permitted to operate without approval from government officials.
(Mainichi Japan) October 5, 2009