By JUNKI WATANABE/ Staff Writer
August 9, 2023 at 16:39 JST
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida addresses a meeting of a My Number task force on Aug. 8 at his office in Tokyo. (Koichi Ueda)
More than 1,000 fresh glitches were found with the government’s embattled personal identification system, where health insurance data was erroneously linked to the wrong My Number accounts.
There were 1,069 new errors, bringing the total to 8,441, according to an interim report by a government task force formed in June to examine the problems.
The latest tally includes 15 cases where a personal medical record was mistakenly accessed by another individual, with five being confirmed in the latest report.
The task force says many of the errors occurred after officials failed to thoroughly check the identities of individuals when linking personal data to My Number accounts.
“Few officials were aware that so many people share both their full names and dates of birth,” said Taro Kono, the digital transformation minister, who is leading the task force.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida instructed Kono and other ministers to finish the complete overhaul of the relevant data by the end of November.
“The government is fully committed to restoring public trust in the My Number system,” Kishida said on Aug. 8 at a task force meeting.
The task force was launched in June to address the series of failures that plagued the system, which the government is pushing as part of its digitalization strategy.
The new cases came to light after the task force ordered more than 1,300 health insurers to review their policyholders' data.
New cases of data mix-ups were also found with other government services linked with the My Number system.
Total errors amounted to 118 involving pension records of public servants and 2,883 with disability certificates.
The report found hundreds of local authorities across the nation followed the wrong procedures in linking My Number accounts with records on resident taxes, child support allowances, nursing care insurance and other public services.
To prevent similar errors, the government pledged to revise relevant regulations and provide new guidelines.
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