Photo/Illutration A smartphone is used to read an IC chip embedded in a foreigner’s residence card and check the stored information against what is written on the card. Any discrepancy would indicate the card has been forged. Part of the image has been deliberately blurred for privacy reasons. (Makoto Oda)

A Tokyo company and its representative were referred to prosecutors last autumn on suspicion of having dispatched a Vietnamese overstayer to a client as a temporary worker.

Police found that the worker’s residence card had been altered to look as if his period of stay had been extended.

The company became a target of investigations on suspicion of “encouraging illegal work” in violation of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law.

Specifically, police said the company failed to check the worker’s original residence card.

The company checked his status of residence and period of stay with a photo of his residence card sent by email when his employment was renewed last spring, according to an executive of the company. The company said it had no way to tell that the card had been forged.

But police said failure to confirm the original residence card, be it on purpose or by negligence, amounts to a violation of the immigration control law, the executive said.

According to the National Police Agency, police took action against a record 790 foreigners in 2020 in connection with residence cards in which the status of residence, period of stay or other items had been altered.

“There is no end to cases of illegal workers using forged residence cards, so we are stepping up crackdowns,” said the NPA’s director for international investigative operations.

The immigration control law requires employers to use all available means to check the foreign workers’ statuses of residence, but the law specifies no concrete methods.

In most cases called into question for encouraging illegal work, employers either knew foreign workers were illegally staying in Japan or intentionally failed to check their original residence cards, according to experts on foreigners’ employment.

The Tokyo company and its representative were eventually given a stay of indictment.

Still, Shohei Sugita, a lawyer who represents the company, said he took the case as a warning that an employer could face criminal punishment for putting a foreigner to work without checking the worker’s original residence card.

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A large number of forged residence cards confiscated by Aichi prefectural police in February 2012 (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

There were 1.72 million foreign workers in Japan as of the end of October, and they were being employed by 267,000 business operators, up 25,000 from a year earlier.

Certified administrative procedures legal specialists familiar with foreigners’ employment said employers tend to be indifferent to foreign workers’ statuses of residence.

Actions are often taken against staffing agencies, which hire foreigners and dispatch them to clients as temporary workers. They face a revocation of their “worker dispatching business” licenses if they are convicted of encouraging illegal work.

An Asahi Shimbun survey found that 10 such staffing agencies had their licenses revoked in fiscal 2020, up from four each in the previous two fiscal years.

A staffing agency subsidiary of a major food manufacturer was referred to prosecutors in December and indicted on suspicion of encouraging illegal work by dispatching Vietnamese former technical intern trainees, whose periods of stay had expired, to a food plant.

Lawyer Koji Yamawaki said the case of the Tokyo company subjected to a police investigation for failing to check a worker’s original residence card will have major ramifications on client companies of staffing agencies.

As things stand, few companies check original residence cards of foreign workers they receive from staffing agencies.

The charge of encouraging illegal work is applicable to “a person who has a foreign national engage in illegal work.”

Yamawaki, who is well-versed in foreigners’ employment, explained that the provision can be construed as not being limited to cases where the “person” is legally employing the worker.

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