TOKYO: Japan’s infrastructure ministry has altered data for statistics on construction works since 2013, it was learned Wednesday.

Monthly orders for domestic construction works projects from public institutions and private firms, one of the core statistics used in calculating Japan’s gross domestic product, were overstated.

The revelation came on top of the padding of monthly employment data at the labor ministry, which came to light in late 2018.

The construction data alterations may constitute a violation of the statistics law, sources familiar with the matter said. The infrastructure ministry is investigating how the miscounting began.

Infrastructure minister Tetsuo Saito admitted to and apologized for the data changes at a meeting of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of Japan’s parliament, the same day.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also expressed regret, saying that the government must make efforts to prevent recurrences.

Kishida added that recent GDP figures were not directly affected by the miscounting, indicating that the problem is unlikely to hamper parliamentary deliberations on the government’s fiscal 2021 supplementary budget.

Saito and Kishida were answering a question from Takeshi Shina of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, who called for launching a third-party investigation into the matter.

The ministry introduced the current method for the construction statistics in April 2013. Since then, businesses that could not complete their surveys on time every month have been allowed to submit multiple months of data together later. The aim was to reduce their workloads.

At the same time, the ministry adopted a rule under which the statistics would use estimated figures for businesses failing to submit their survey results on time, instead of booking zero orders.

This sometimes caused the ministry to count both the actual figures from businesses that submitted multiple months’ worth of data all together and their estimates.

Moreover, the ministry made prefectural governments rewrite multiple months’ worth of data as single-month data.

A ministry official said the data rewriting was necessary for technical reasons, claiming that the ministry had no intention of manipulating figures.

In September this year, the Board of Audit of Japan suggested in a report that the statistical method had not been appropriate.

In response to the report, the infrastructure ministry corrected the method in April and recounted data dating back to January 2020.

JIJI Press