Japan Press Weekly

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2014 August 13 - 19 [POLITICS]

Municipality’s outsourcing of family registration service arouses public concern

Adachi Ward in Tokyo, which is pushing ahead with the outsourcing of public services to the private sector, has been causing confusion among local residents.

A woman in her 40s, who visited the ward office to get a copy of her family register, said with a worried look, “I cannot believe that a private company is handling official documents like family registers.”

The ward government already farmed out to private companies the services of the public nursing-care insurance, the national health-care insurance, and accounting management. The ward plans to outsource to the private sector all its public services other than tax collection and welfare assistance. Companies that won contracts with the municipality are all major temp agencies such as Tempstaff and Pasona Group.

Lawyer Kuroiwa Tetsuhiko, representing a civic group opposing the municipality’s outsourcing policy, stressed, “A register of families contains a mass of personal information. Once it leaks out, it cannot be undone. It’s an invasion of privacy for a local government to have a private corporation handle the family registration system.”

Even though the ward insisted that the delegation to the private sector would lead to reducing costs as well as cutting red tape, it brought about a result opposite to what they claimed. One day, a couple who submitted a notification of their marriage to the office at 9 a.m. were finally able to return to their home at 4 p.m. Adachi Ward Mayor Kondo Yayoi apologized for having citizens wait for an excessively long time in the office and admitted that the outsourcing costs will exceed the previous running costs when the municipality maintained the service itself.

On top of that, it has come to light that the outsourcing itself constitutes a violation of laws.

The Family Registration Law requires local authorities to have public servants make a judgment regarding whether or not to accept any application from citizens in order to prevent dishonest acts such as false adoptions. If a private firm employee made this judgment, it would be in violation of the law.

On the other hand, if a worker sent from a private contractor asks a municipal official to give him/her an order in the above-mentioned case, the worker is considered to be a temporary employee. This means that the local government illegally uses temp staffers under an outsourcing contract.

In May this year, responding to the interpellation from Japanese Communist Party member of the House of Councilors Nihi Sohei, a Justice Ministry official acknowledged that outsourced services include ones which should be operated by civil servants.

In July, the Tokyo Labor Bureau directed the ward to put an end to its unlawful labor practices associated with its outsourcing by August 20. At present, the municipal authorities are taking it into consideration to have ward employees engage in part of the family registration service as they did before.

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> Auto repair company is running public libraries? [December 27, 2014]