THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
August 5, 2022 at 17:57 JST
A document distributed by land ministry officials to prefectural officials shows how to compile construction contract figures for companies late in submitting reports. (Yosuke Fukudome)
Construction contract figures between the 2013 and 2020 fiscal years were inflated by 34.5 trillion yen ($260 billion) due to double-counting and miscalculations, the land ministry announced on Aug. 5.
The ministry also disclosed that the general construction statistics were inflated by between 0.1 trillion to 0.3 trillion yen for each fiscal year from FY 2013 to FY 2020.
The statistic is calculated based on construction contract figures and is used to calculate Japan’s gross domestic product.
The ministry will also study the data falsification’s impact on the gross domestic product, it said.
The breakdown of the inflated amounts was 4.6 trillion yen in FY 2013, 4.1 trillion yen in FY 2014, 5.2 trillion yen in FY 2015, 5.2 trillion yen in FY 2016, 4.3 trillion yen in FY 2017, 5.1 trillion yen in FY 2018, 3.2 trillion yen in FY 2019 and 2.8 trillion yen in FY 2020.
The ministry obtained the figures by using a calculation method that the expert panel, which the ministry established, presented to it in May.
Falsification of construction contract figures came to light in an Asahi Shimbun report in December 2021.
The ministry calculates the construction contract figures based on a sample of about 12,000 construction companies around the nation chosen for a one-year period from the 480,000 or so construction companies.
The selected companies must submit monthly reports on the monetary figures of contracts they received for that month. The aggregated figures are then used to estimate the total amount of construction contracts.
From FY 2013 to FY 2020, when a company was late in submitting its figures, instead of listing “zero” for the month when no report was submitted, prefectural government workers--per the instructions of land ministry officials--used the average figure of all the companies that submitted reports.
When the company in question finally submitted its report, however, the figure for the month when it failed to provide the number was included in the total figure for the latest reporting month.
But since the average figure was already used as that company’s amount for the unreported month, the result was a double-counting of contract amounts the company received.
In addition to the double-counting, it was found some figures were undercounted.
The ministry took into account both the double-counting and the miscalculation to arrive at the figures it announced on Aug. 5.
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