Four temporary staffing agencies in three prefectures have been accused of evading more than 300 million yen in consumption tax by establishing dummy companies to which they pretended to outsource job placements, The Yomiuri Shimbun learned Thursday.

The revelation comes at a time when the national tax authorities have been stepping up investigations into evasion of consumption tax due to the public’s high interest in the tax, which accounts for about 20 percent of the total state tax revenue.

Three of the four job placement agencies are located in Hadano and Ebina, Kanagawa Prefecture, and in Numazu, Shizuoka Prefecture, and are operated under the same name, AA TOPIC. The other agency is located in Osaka Prefecture.

The Tokyo and Nagoya regional taxation bureaus have filed a tax evasion complaint with the Yokohama and Shizuoka district public prosecutors offices against the three firms and their former president, Tomoyuki Sato, 48.

The three companies allegedly made it appear that they had dispatched personnel to clients through dummy outsourcing firms though they actually sent their employees directly to the clients, thereby evading consumption tax totaling about 230 million yen over four years until the business term ended in March last year.

They allegedly repeated the practice of establishing and liquidating dummy outsourcing companies to conceal instances of tax evasion.

According to a private credit research company, the three companies sent about 1,000 temporary factory and clerical workers to major carmakers and precision machine makers in Kanagawa and Shizuoka prefectures.

An executive of the Numazu company, whose name has been changed to Area Staff, admitted that the company had been investigated for tax evasion, but would not elaborate, saying, “Only former President Sato knows the details.”

The special investigation squad of the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office has arrested Seiji Fujiwara, 48, president of job placement company Interu in Tadaokacho, Osaka Prefecture, on suspicion that the company evaded a total of about 82 million yen in consumption tax.

The Osaka Regional Taxation Bureau has joined the prosecutors office to conduct a probe into the case.

According to the investigation, the company dispatched its employees to a pachinko parlor for three years until the business term that ended in June 2005, but it evaded payment of the due consumption tax by making it appear that it outsourced the dispatch of temporary staff to a dummy job placement firm.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070126TDY01003.htm

Police on Wednesday arrested the representative director of an Okayama-based recruitment cooperative on suspicion of illegally dispatching an Indonesian trainee to an unauthorized local factory.

The Okayama and Hiroshima prefectural police jointly began investigating Keisuke Tsuruno, 60, the representative director of Sanyo Intec, earlier in the day on suspicion of violating the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law.

According to the police, the Indonesian trainee was accepted by the cooperative under the government-run foreign trainee system in October. Tsuruno then dispatched him to the factory to work, although it was not a training site designated under the system.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070125TDY02004.htm

The Maebashi-based firm, one of the nation’s largest consumer electronics retailers, is suspected of ordering the salespeople to confirm and promise to follow 35 instructions on a checklist at the Labi 1 Namba outlet in Naniwa Ward, Osaka.

The labor bureau will clarify the circumstances surrounding the dispatched salespeople.

The outlet has not revealed how many salespeople were dispatched by the electronics manufacturers. However, The Yomiuri Shimbun discovered at the end of last year that at least 60 dispatched salespeople were working at the outlet at the time.

According to sources, the outlet gave each of the salespeople a checklist on their first day of work, including instructions concerning dress code and breaks. The salespeople were also required to brush up on other popular home electric appliances manufactured by rival firms.

The dispatched salespeople were asked to confirm each item on the list by checking it off. They then had to sign their names and put their seals on a printed statement agreeing to follow the instructions and work to the best of their ability.

The labor bureau felt the checklist was evidence the outlet supervised salespeople who were not contracted to the firm.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070125TDY02005.htm

The ruling coalition parties agreed Wednesday to call for a legal ban on age limits when companies recruit workers, member lawmakers said. The proposed ban is aimed at helping young people and retired workers find jobs, they said.

The elimination of age restrictions in recruitment is currently a nonbinding target for companies under the existing law. But many firms set age brackets for eligible job applicants when they put up help-wanted advertisements, making it difficult for people in their late 20s or older to find full-time jobs. The practice is expected to gravely affect the labor market as the massive mandatory retirement of baby-boom workers begins this year, prompting many of them to seek new employment.

http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/397092

Wary of an upcoming election, the ruling bloc is backing off on a highly contentious bill that would exclude certain white-collar workers from overtime pay.

But debate over the issue, which unions fiercely oppose, will resurface because the government’s retreat is widely believed a mere postponement until after the July Upper House election.

Certain white-collar workers would be excluded from legal work-hour restrictions under the Labor Standards Law, which limits work hours to eight hours a day and 40 hours a week and obliges employers to pay for overtime.

The government says the proposed system is modeled after one in the United States with the same name.

Unions and opposition parties branded the proposal the “elimination of overtime pay bill,” provoking fear among salaried workers that they would receive no extra pay even if they have to continue working long hours. This worried lawmakers in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito whose eyes are on the summer Upper House election.

Unions are against the system itself because changes to the hour limitations would mean abolishing the most basic protection for employees.

They argue that without changing Japan’s notorious penchant for requiring long work hours, the new system would only make matters worse and workers would get less pay.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20070124a3.html