Japan Press Weekly

Tweet

2016 February 3 - 9 [POLITICS]

Audit Board regarded secrecy law as constitutionally controversial

A battle of words unfolded in September and October of 2013 over a state secrets protection bill between the Board of Audit of Japan and the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office which drafted the bill. It was shortly before the secrecy bill was submitted to the Diet.

Through an information disclosure request, Akahata recently obtained documents noting conversations between the two. According to these materials, the Audit Board was insisting that the bill which will allow part of government accounting to be immune from audits is constitutionally controversial.

Article 90 of the Japanese Constitution stipulates, “Final accounts of the expenditures and revenues of the State shall be audited annually by a Board of Audit and submitted by the Cabinet to the Diet.”

The Board in those materials was noting that by drawing a lesson from Japan’s past war of aggression, the postwar Constitution disallows any exemption from accounting audits.

The state secrets law, in contrast, articulates that administrative organs in their judgment can refuse to provide information designated as special secrets no matter if an access to the information is requested by the Diet.

The auditing authority was suggesting a problem with the bill, arguing that it leaves a possibility that required documents could be withheld from the Board.

An unfruitful exchange of words continued in writing between the Board which was demanding the modification to the bill and the Cabinet intelligence office which was refusing any modification to the bill. With only three weeks left before the Cabinet approval of the bill, the setting of this battle moved to telephone exchanges.

In the end, the Board of Audit gave in to the Cabinet intelligence office which proposed issuing directives to relevant ministries to not refuse to submit classified-stamped documents to the Board.

However, this proposal was put to use more than two years after the bill became law. The intelligence office on December 25, 2015 finally issued directives to 20 institutions, including the Defense Ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Nuclear Regulation Authority.

Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law at Rissho University Urano Hiroaki, also a tax accountant, said, “Reflecting upon its bitter experience, Japan has a multi-tier legal system to stop state organs from going too far. The present government led by Prime Minister Abe is attempting to disregard the importance of this system and water down the existing Constitution.”

Urano also said, “Only with an exhaustive provision of information can financial correctness be assured. If portions of accounting books were kept secret, the accuracy of the overall balance of payments would be questionable. This would question the raison d’etre of the Board of Audit. So, it is natural for the Board to have insisted on the bill’s amendment.”

* * *

Up until the end of WWII, war reserve stocks for the Imperial Army and Navy along with diplomatic, policing, and military-related accounting matters were out of the range of any attempt at accurate auditing in Japan. The activity of auditors became even more restricted after the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident.

The book “100 years of the Board” includes the account about the confrontation between the audit organ and the former Japanese Army which tried to designate many goods as war reserve stocks in order to be immune from being audited. With the 1937 revision of the former Military Secrets Law as a trigger, almost all documents submitted to the Board began being stamped “confidential”, according to the book.