12 prefectures misused 550 mil. yen of central gov't subsidies+

TOKYO, Oct. 18 Kyodo - All 12 prefectural governments randomly inspected by the Board of Audit of
Japan misused as much as a total of 550 million yen in subsidies from the
central government in the five years to March 2007, board sources said
Saturday.
The constitutional auditing institution, independent of both the Cabinet and
the Diet, will ask the 12 prefectures to return the misused subsidies to the
central government and investigate all of the other prefectures for accounting
irregularities, the sources said.
The 12 prefectures are Aichi, Aomori, Fukushima, Gifu, Gunma, Hokkaido, Iwate,
Kyoto, Nagano, Oita, Tochigi and Wakayama. Aichi alone misused 130 million yen,
the prefectural government said at a news conference.
Iwate said it misused about 100 million yen. Kyoto, Wakayama and Fukushima
misused about 97 million yen, 50 million yen and 33 million yen, respectively.
The accounting irregularities were connected to projects subsidized by the
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism as well as the Ministry
of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.
In many cases, prefectural governments handed part of the subsidies to
companies on the pretext that they had purchased office and stationery goods,
such as copier paper, from the companies, the sources said. The money was
pooled in the companies' accounts as slush funds for the governments.
In one case, personnel costs were booked for part-time jobs that did not exist,
they said.
In its 1996-1998 inspections, the board discovered 23 prefectures had been
engaged in accounting irregularities involving the misuse of a total of 43
billion yen in subsidies provided by the central government.
==Kyodo