because it is irking me to no end. Centarians are celebrated here because Japan has so many of them and you see reports etc. on them now and then. Recently someone tried to track down the oldest man in Tokyo at 113. And they turned up nothing. They also found the oldest woman in Tokyo as mummified remains. They (and this is still largely the media and volunteers) decided to follow up on this and have in the past 3 days or so found 59 centarians that are missing. Their families all say they are living with someone else, or giving addresses for parking lots in other areas or just saying they don't know. Sociologists and even the Prime Minister are blaming this on the growing "weak social ties" in Japan and blah blah.

Weak social ties?! It seems to me it is pension fraud pure and simple. People are not declaring the deaths of older relatives so they can keep collecting their pension money. It is so obvious it makes me want to scream. And the govt is moving so glacially on this - giving a lot of people breaking the law and the nation's trust time to cover their tracks and get their stories straight. And yet their is still no talk of checking for people under 100 who have died but not been so declared by their families. I pay into the Japanese pension system, something that I did relunctantly, but am now counting on to help get me through post retirement. Others are in the same boat as me but there is no furor that I can see at all over here.
It is maddening. Anyway, case in point this article I am linking has only one small mention of pensions. aargh!

Nothing in the news over here, I'm afraid.

Sorry to keep posting, I am livid and also the text window on the windows for posts on my in-laws computer won't let me see the text anymore after I write a certain amount. My in-laws are among those that don't seem very concerned by this.

anyway, here is an article I found that addresses my concerns more directly. Still a very tepid govt response:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-04...on-records.html

Nice scam if you can get away with it.
I understand your anger - it's just not right.

In the United States, some dead dudes continue to get checks! And, some living persons get reported dead and stop getting SS checks.


WASHINGTON — The Social Security Administration has continued to pay millions of dollars in benefits to dead Americans, and other elderly U.S. residents are at risk of losing badly needed aid because they're improperly recorded as deceased, federal investigators warn in a new report.

The consequences of either bureaucratic error can be severe.

"The addition of erroneous death entries can lead to benefit termination, cause severe financial hardship and distress to affected individuals," investigators with the Social Security Administration's Office of Inspector General noted in the report, which was quietly released on Sunday.

The mistakes cost taxpayers and individual beneficiaries in different ways. Taxpayers are losing money when benefits are paid to the deceased. Individuals get into trouble when they're prematurely pronounced dead.

In Southern California and elsewhere last year, investigators analyzed 305 Social Security beneficiaries who were recorded as deceased in their Social Security Administration files. At least 140 of them were still alive.

All told, investigators say, more than 6,000 current Social Security beneficiaries are recorded as being deceased. An untold number of them are still, in fact, alive.

"There is no rhyme or reason," the Scott Nishioki, chief of staff for Rep. Jim Costa, D-Calif., said Tuesday of the recurring Social Security problems. "Often, it's probably just a clerical error."

Costa's office has handled about 10 cases in the past four years in which the Social Security Administration has incorrectly classified constituents as dead, Nishioki said. Other congressional offices have periodically confronted the same problem.

The identified problems are only a fraction of the nation's 50 million Social Security beneficiaries, and Social Security officials say they've instituted protective measures.

Social Security officials already have recovered some of the improperly paid-out funds. They further agreed to investigate "as quickly as possible based on available resources" the correct status of 6,733 potentially deceased individuals identified in the new audit.

"We will investigate the alert and follow-up systems to assess how these cases were missed by our current controls," James A. Winn, chief of staff for the Social Security Administration, said in the agency's formal response.

An agency representative couldn't be reached Tuesday to elaborate on the audit.

Those affected can feel the problem acutely even if they're still getting Social Security checks, because Social Security death records can be used by other agencies.

Several individuals told investigators that they "had to prove to the Internal Revenue Service they were not deceased before receiving a refund," investigators noted. Some sought congressional help.

"A retired beneficiary expressed a recurring problem when he could not receive funding from his private pension plan since he was declared deceased," the investigators noted. "Each time he attempted to correct the issue, the problem recurred when the pension plan updated its death information."

The flip side of the problem occurs when a beneficiary is properly designated as deceased, but the Social Security benefits continue. Payments were made to dead beneficiaries in at least 88 out of the 305 cases studied by investigators. Some of these improper payments continued for years.

For instance, a New York City resident died in April 1990. Nonetheless, Social Security checks of $1,185 were mailed out monthly, and cashed, until October 2008. Investigators have since charged a suspect with improperly taking more than $210,000 in benefits.

All told, investigators found $2 million in improper payments were made to the 88 deceased beneficiaries. In some cases, a "death alert tracking system" hadn't properly notified Social Security field offices. In other cases, Social Security numbers were transposed.

Investigators in April further identified 6,733 Social Security benefit recipients whose master files "contained a date of death." Extrapolating from their smaller sample, investigators warned that more than $40 million may have been paid out improperly to deceased beneficiaries.

As a result of the new study, at least three dozen potential criminal cases have been forwarded to the agency's Office of Investigations for further inquiry and possible prosecution.

It's pretty big news on Twitter. Yes, Japan's oldest woman hasn't had eyes laid on her for over two decades. IIRC, the story was that a relative claims she'd moved to some crib in the eighties and that was the last they'd heard of her. Of course, she'd not been there for over two decades. No mummified remains, of course, so evidently her corpse is on the run somewhere.

Ed

I know this problem is not Japan's alone, but Japan and Japanese people have a tendency to take people's word for things and let things go on and on when something really should be done. And the list of people who were supposed to be alive and were collecting pensions is growing very quickly. The gov't has promised to start with a thorough check of all the people that are supposed to be aged over 110. This is a drop in the pond. They should be checking anyone and everyone who is collecting a pension. The pension system here is nationalized and already at risk of imploding b/c Japanese people aren't having kids. This is going to get a lot bigger, I am sure of it.

Ben, from what little English commentary I have seen on this, they are getting it wrong. The woman was supposed to be the oldest in Tokyo, not Japan, though admittedly Tokyo's population is huge. The oldest man and woman in Japan at any time get a lot of media attention over here, so I don't think they could pull of fraud with them. But it is still amazing how easily people were/are pulling it off.

Lano

I think your thoughts on this is more from the belief that Japanese as a hole are very conservative. Meaning they don't normally rip off people and their government, nor they sue people, companies or their own government. So for you it is more disbelief ? Seeing this kind of activity.

Where as in the US this is not common but certainly not unusual either.

Yeah, that is part of the outrage. At the same time, when people do rip off others or the govt, they get away with it a lot more because of the inherent hands off attitude over here.

This will get bigger. One of the latest news items I saw was that a big city in southern Japan can't account for 40 percent of it's centarians. A lot of this is bad record keeping (which was a big scandal about 5 years ago that was supposed to have been fixed) and I am sure the number will be smaller than 40 percent when they have finished. But still, I am sure the gov't is probably already assessing damage control as this gets bigger, but hopefully the media (on a tighter noose than you would expect for a democracy) will see it through.