Japan Press Weekly

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2013 April 24 - May 7 [POLITICS]

National ID system will eat up public money

The central government is trying to introduce an online national ID system, which requires all Japanese people to have a personal identification number, by using a huge amount of taxpayers’ money. However, an online application system the administration set up has hardly spread among the public.

If the maintenance cost of the existing application system is divided by the number of applications, for example, it comes to 16 million yen for issuing a passport, and 1.34 million yen for registering a new car.

The government enacted the IT Basic Law in 2000 under the name of the development of e-government, introducing the new application system to offer administrative services online. But a half of all the 6,973 online programs were abolished last year because their usage rate was too low. Over a half of these discontinued procedures has never been used even once for the past three years.

The electric application system is now called “IT-related giant public facility,” as it wastes an enormous amount of public money without specific needs.

The national ID system bill is under discussion at the Diet. The administration estimates the cost of the system’s introduction at 300 billion yen, and at 30 billion yen for the annual running expenses.

A local government worker who is in charge of a computer network said, “If an electronic system is established, its cost goes up endlessly because both the system and computers need to be updated every few years. I think the bill is intended to benefit IT companies, not the citizens.”

Related past article:
> Diet debate begins on bill to implement national ID system [March 23, 2013]