Japan Pension Service Officials Discarded Doctors’ Disability Assessments

From Kyodo via Yahoo! Japan

December 28 2025

TOKYO – It has emerged through interviews with informed sources on the 28th that at the Japan Pension Service, which handles the administration of the state disability pension paid to people with disabilities, staff have secretly discarded doctors’ assessment records and asked other doctors to redo the assessments when they judged there to be problems with the original determination on whether benefits should be granted or denied. Responding to inquiries, the Pension Service acknowledged that such handling had occurred and said it is “confirming the facts, including the number of cases.”

Staff do not have the authority to overturn doctors’ determinations, yet the practice appears to have continued for many years. There may be people who were deprived of their right to receive a pension as a result of reassessments. Because staff judgments influenced whether benefits were granted, trust in the system is likely to be shaken.

Applications for disability pensions are submitted at municipal offices and the like, after which documents from across the country are sent to the Pension Service’s Disability Pension Center. Doctors who conduct the assessments are assigned by type of disability.

In principle, assessments are carried out by a single doctor. According to sources, because doctors’ judgments involve subjectivity and individual differences, when staff deemed a decision to grant or deny benefits “too lenient” or “too strict,” they disposed of the records, by shredding, for example, and asked another doctor to conduct a new assessment. The first doctor was not informed.