Social Insurance Agency
Defunct Japanese public welfare agency
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Social Insurance Agency (社会保険庁, Shakaihoken-chō) was an agency administered by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare. After a scandal involving millions of lost pension records, on January 1, 2010, it was abolished and replaced by the Japan Pension Service.[1] It was responsible for four types of social insurance
- Employees’ Health Insurance
- Seamens' Insurance
- Employees’ Pension Insurance
- The National Pension.[2]
Pension records problem
The Social Insurance Agency computerized their records in 1979[3] and in 1997 the SIA attempted to integrate three different databases together.[4] Numerous problems resulted from this and in May 2007 it was exposed by the then-opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan that 50 million pre-1997 premium payers could not be matched to any citizen enrolled in the system.[5] The then-ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party, subsequently suffered a loss in the 2007 election, which was partly attributed to the pension scandal.[6]
By January 2010, 14 million of these 50 million records had been consolidated with an existing pension number.[7]
