Photo/Illutration A document land ministry officials distributed to prefectural officials shows how to compile construction contract figures for companies late in submitting reports. (Yosuke Fukudome)

The Asahi Shimbun has received the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association award for its series of exclusives and related reports on the land ministry falsifying construction figures, it was announced Sept. 7.

The association praised the series of reports, saying they were the work of “investigative journalists who performed the role of being a check on the administration’s actions by revealing the falsification of data concerning the government’s policymaking.”

The awards ceremony will be held as part of an event the association will hold in Fuji-Yoshida, Yamanashi Prefecture, on Oct. 18.

The first report on the falsification issue appeared on Dec. 15 last year in the morning edition.

The Asahi Shimbun exclusively reported that the land ministry falsified and double-counted construction order statistics, one of the nation's fundamental statistics, resulting in data inflation.

“The first report was a huge shock to society,” the association said in explaining the decision for the award. 

The ministry calculates the construction contract figures based on a sample of about 12,000 construction companies.

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.

The Asahi Shimbun revealed that from the 2013 to 2020 fiscal years, 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.

The first report also cited the other data falsification scandal at the health ministry revealed in 2018, criticizing that the measures to prevent a data falsification recurrence were not working.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida admitted what was reported was true, and land minister Tetsuo Saito apologized.

A third-party committee investigation revealed the land ministry was engaged in an organizational cover-up to hide the falsification.

As a result, the ministry implemented disciplinary actions against its senior officials, including the vice minister.

After recounting, the land ministry found that construction contract figures between the 2013 and 2020 fiscal years were inflated by 34.5 trillion yen ($240 billion).

The statistics in question were modified and Japan’s GDP was then amended.

Five other newspapers--The Yomiuri Shimbun, The Mainichi Shimbun, The Chugoku Shimbun, The Hokkaido Shimbun and The Shizuoka Shimbun--also won the award for their reporting this year. 

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