Photo/Illutration Japan Pension Service officials apologize in Tokyo on Oct. 6 for pension payment notices being mailed to wrong addresses. (Hayato Murai)

A total of 972,023 pension payment notices for October were mailed to the wrong people in 53 municipalities in Aichi, Mie and Fukuoka prefectures, the Japan Pension Service said on Oct. 6.

Welfare minister Shigeyuki Goto on Oct. 7 apologized for the inconvenience caused by the pension agency his ministry oversees, saying he will ensure that consultation services are provided to affected people and no similar incidents occur again.

Information printed on the notices for October include pension amount for August and September to be paid on Oct. 15, as well as pension IDs, and the names of financial institutions and their branches through which the pension will be paid.

The agency, however, said it will be impossible to identify the pension recipients from the notices because they do not contain names or bank account numbers.

The Japan Pension Service, which manages the nation’s public pension system, began investigating the matter after recipients said other people’s pension amounts were printed on the notices.

The agency said it contracts out the printing and delivery work for the notices to nine companies. It believes one of the contractors, Sun Messe Co., based in Gifu Prefecture, printed wrong addresses on notices it sent on Oct. 4 and 5.

“We have yet to identify what went wrong during the printing process,” an official of the company said.

The Japan Pension Service said it plans to send the notices to the right recipients on Oct. 11 and pay them the correct pension amount on Oct. 15.

The agency will urge residents in the affected areas to return notices they received or throw them away without opening them.

The Japan Pension Service has been hit by a series of scandals, including 1.25 million cases of personal information being leaked in 2015.

(This article was written by Suguru Takizawa and Ryuichi Hisanaga.)

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