Employees of the Kamaishi city government in Iwate Prefecture secretly collected personal information on residents, including 2011 disaster survivors, and mocked their real or perceived situations in life, The Asahi Shimbun has found.

In one instance in February 2021, two female employees talked online about an acqaintance who had applied for a child care fee reduction or exemption available for those affected by the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.

The first employee, who worked in the planning and coordination department, described the applicant as “shrewd and calculating,” according to documents obtained by The Asahi Shimbun through an information disclosure request.

The second employee, who worked in the citizens affairs department, responded by saying the applicant, whose name was blacked out in the documents, was “greedy” and “unashamed about using petty means.”

The Kamaishi city government dismissed the first employee, who was in her 40s, in May 2022.

Her husband, also in his 40s, who worked in the city’s construction department, was sacked at the same time.

The couple were accused of obtaining personal information without authorization of all 32,000 city residents listed on basic resident registers.

The second female employee, also in her 40s, was suspended from work for three months in August 2022 for inappropriately providing personal information on some residents to the first employee.

The case came to the authorities’ attention following a tipoff from an anonymous whistleblower.

According to documents compiled by the city’s investigation committee that were obtained by The Asahi Shimbun, the three exchanged email and chat messages on personal computers at the city government office.

The idle conversations, which were done out of curiosity between the two female employees, covered a range of topics unrelated to their work, such as family circumstances of residents and medical histories of city employees.

In February 2021, the first employee said she felt “irritated” after finding the name of an acquaintance in documents on those who had fallen behind in payments of municipal facility usage fees. She described the aquaintance as “hypocritical.”

The second employee responded by saying that person was “arrogant.”

In a separate conversation, the first employee asked whether a certain woman had gotten married twice. The second employee looked at the woman’s resident card and said she was probably once divorced.

One instance appeared to go beyond gossip.

An exchange in June 2021 suggested that the first employee, whose department was in charge of auditing, tried to exclude work involving her husband from the scope of an audit.

According to the investigation committee’s report posted on the city government’s website on May 1, the first employee and her husband emailed residents’ personal information, such as birthdates and incomes, to their home computer.

Data from basic resident registers on all city residents between 2017 and 2022 were found on USB memory devices at their home.

The investigation committee interviewed 11 people, including the three employees, and examined more than 100,000 email and chat messages.

The committee said it has not confirmed any leakage of information to parties outside the city government.

The first employee and her husband were sent to prosecutors on suspicion of violating the law on basic resident registers in November.

But the Morioka District Public Prosecutors Office in December decided not to indict the two in consideration of the facts about the case and the developments that followed.

The investigation committee’s report cited inadequate data-handling procedures, regarding encryption and approval by superiors, as factors leading to the case. It also mentioned the employees’ thinking that there would be no problem unless the personal information was taken out of the city government.

The city government also handed written reprimands to seven superiors.

It plans to implement measures to prevent a recurrence, such as developing a system that prevents the viewing of electronic documents taken out without authorization, by the end of this fiscal year.