Japanese Longevity: Skeletons in closets
The Power Magazine No. 33-2010
The articles are published on the website <url>
Dead souls in JapaneseVyacheslav Belash
Japan has always been proud of its leading positions in the world in terms of life expectancy and the number of citizens whose age has exceeded 100 years. Now it turned out that it's not just the diet of the Japanese and their lifestyle, but also the greed of their relatives.
In June, the authorities of the Japanese capital wanted to congratulate a certain Sogen Kato, who, according to documents, had just turned 111 years old and who, after the death of another Tokyo resident, became the oldest resident of the city.
When festively dressed representatives of the city administration knocked on the door of Kato's house, his daughter, who has long been over 70, began to apologize. Her father was ill, she said, so she could not go out to them and accept congratulations in person. The officials took their leave. They came a few days later and were delighted with the news that Sogen Kato had become so well that he decided to go to relatives in another city for a while and would probably not return very soon.
If officials were less conscientious, they would have sent a diploma and a gift by mail. But they were instructed to present everything personally, and they came again. It was then that someone from the Kato family let slip that he had not seen the old man for thirty years. Despite her daughter's protests, the administration representatives opened the door of Kato's room and found his mummified body. During that time, while relatives said that Kato was alive, but wanted complete privacy ("He wanted to become a living Buddha," his daughter said), the state paid him a pension totaling almost 10 million yen. Further investigation revealed that almost all of this money had been received relatively recently by Kato's relatives. Now several members of Kato's family have been arrested and are under investigation. They are accused of trying to hide the death of a person and fraud with pension payments.
The capital's scandal turned into a nationwide one when it turned out that it was not known where Fusa Furuya, the woman to whom the title of the oldest resident of Tokyo passed from Kato, was also located. As reported by ABC News, her daughter said she had not seen Fusu since 1986.
The story of Sogen Kato and Fusa Furuya struck Japan. Until now, the residents of the country and its authorities were proud of their centenarians, because they were the real confirmation that the Japanese lifestyle, the Japanese diet and, finally, adherence to Japanese values are the best in the world. "While in Europe and America people try to get rid of their elderly by sending them to nursing homes, the Japanese surround their parents with round–the-clock care," says one of the Japanese sociologists. "This, of course, together with our unsurpassed diet based on rice and seafood, turns out to be an important factor when it comes to increasing life expectancy."
It turned out that this point of view, if not fundamentally wrong (after all, the fate of only 0.8% of all Japanese who are over 100 years old causes doubts among the police, pension and social workers), then in any case requires adjustment. According to an American diplomat accredited in Tokyo, such a situation is simply impossible in the United States. "You can say anything about the greatness of the Japanese tradition of parental care, but the system in which 70-year-olds who need help themselves also take care of their parents is absurd. Moreover, in such conditions, with the almost complete absence of a system of nursing homes or special cooperatives for the elderly, of course, various frauds with pensions are not just possible – they are inevitable."
After the incident with the Kato family, the Government ordered a thorough investigation of the situation. It's still going on. But already in the first two weeks, at least 280 cases were revealed when pensions were paid to those whom the authorities could not find at their official address of residence, or to those who died a long time ago. As reported by the newspaper "Iomiuri", in one of the cases, officials who decided to visit a woman who, according to the documents, was 103 years old, found that her house had long been demolished, and a shopping complex was built in its place at least a couple of decades ago. The pension of this woman, however, was regularly taken away by relatives.
Experts started talking about the need to change Japanese laws related to the registration of death. In accordance with the current legislation, relatives are required to report the death of a person, receive a death certificate and transfer it to the pension fund within a week. The police and doctors are not only not obliged to take part in this, but in many cases they have no right at all to transmit the information they have. Therefore, almost the only source of information for the pension fund is relatives. Violation of the rules is punishable by a fine of 50 thousand yen. But those who want to make money on the death of their closest relatives do not stop before this threat.
So far, as the Japanese authorities have stated, the accrual of pensions to 240 dead souls has stopped.
According to one of the experts, Hiroshi Takahashi from the Tokyo International University of Health and Social Protection, it is not necessary to consider everyone who does not report the death or even disappearance of their relatives as intruders. "We can talk more about the breakdown of normal family relations, rather than about a crime," he believes. For example, the relatives of a man who, according to official papers, must now be 103 years old, informed the authorities when they decided to find out about his whereabouts that he simply left home about 40 years ago and has not yet returned. "We continued to take his pension in case he suddenly reappears," the man's son said and added that he had not spent a single yen from his father's pension.
Representatives of the Ministry of Health of Japan said that by order of the Minister, the department's staff will pay visits to all residents of Japan whose age exceeds 110 years. This is the only way, they say, to determine which of the oldest people in Japan is actually alive. Critics of the government immediately considered this measure clearly insufficient.
"It is clear that they start with the most suspicious cases, but a check of all Japanese centenarians is required. The police and social workers will need a lot of time and effort to check all such people, but it is simply necessary to do this," said one of the Japanese experts. Many offer a new look at the country, which has been glorified by centenarians.
According to the Japanese authorities, in 1963 there were only 153 people in the country whose age exceeded 99 years. To date, according to the Ministry of Health, there are already 40,399 such people in Japan, and 4,800 of them live in Tokyo. According to many, these figures are too significant to be true. "Of course, the quality of life and the quality of medical and other services has become higher. No one will doubt that life expectancy is gradually increasing. But these figures are just fantastic," said a Japanese official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
It cannot be said that Japanese social workers and doctors did not try to check anything at all. But the country's legislation, which severely restricts the right of officials to invade the privacy of citizens, reduced the possibility of any checks. For example, social workers cannot visit a pensioner without his personal consent or the consent of his next of kin. This, in fact, was confirmed by the story of Kato. Until someone close to them let it slip and officials had no serious reason to check their suspicions about pension fraud, they had no right to enter this person's house.
According to the official representative of the Japanese government, Yoshito Sengoku, a bill will be submitted to parliament obliging the social protection service to monitor the welfare of elderly Japanese and expanding the powers of this service. He also noted that the legislation concerning the transfer of personal data may be changed if, during the investigation, it turns out that it contributed to fraud with pensions.
Dead souls in RussianVadim Zaitsev
Fraud involving the data of deceased or never-existing people is also popular in modern Russia.
In the field of pension provision, such crimes are committed by both relatives of deceased elderly people and employees of the pension fund. In the first case, the record for the duration of the scam is the case of a resident of Novomoskovsk, Elena Predgauer. For 13 years, from 1995 to 2008, she received her deceased mother's pension with the help of a fake power of attorney. According to the estimates of the prosecutor's office, the damage amounted to 226 thousand rubles.
In May 2010, the Prosecutor's Office opened eight criminal cases in North Ossetia on the facts of pension fraud. During the audit in the republican pension fund, it turned out that the criminals received more than 800 thousand rubles from fictitious powers of attorney of deceased citizens.
In April 2010, the theft of 5.78 million rubles was revealed in the department of the FIU of the Baksan district of Kabardino-Balkaria. According to the investigation, in 2003 and 2007, the department was provided with personal data and fictitious documents of two dozen non-existent persons, on the basis of which old-age pensions were issued.
Another scheme of fraud with pension money was revealed in 2009 in Moscow. Two employees of the FIU sent requests to the registry offices about pensioners whose pension accounts in Sberbank remained motionless for a long time. If the registry office confirmed that an elderly person had died, the fraudsters reported this to their accomplices in one of the bank's branches. According to investigators, about 2.5 million rubles were withdrawn from the accounts of the deceased.
Recently, other budgetary spheres have also become frequent defendants in cases with dead souls. So, in April 2010, the head of the food service of the Svobodnensky garrison (Amur region) was sentenced to 18 months in a colony Senior Lieutenant Andrey Khlamov. The officer forged documents and received 1.2 million rubles worth of dry rations for the non-existent 51 servicemen.
In March 2010, the former head of the 439th Laboratory of Veterinary and Sanitary Examination of the Siberian Military District, Lieutenant Colonel Gennady Dudko, was sentenced to two years of probation. In the division headed by the officer, there were employees who did not actually work, but received salaries that were assigned to convicts. The damage was estimated at 2.7 million rubles.
In November 2009, in the Vladimir region, it was revealed that more than 4 thousand children registered as schoolchildren do not study anywhere and do not exist at all. The postscript is explained by the fact that the region has switched to a per capita system of financing education. The damage is estimated at 102 million rubles.
In October 2009, embezzlement was revealed at the Federal State Institution "United Hospital with Polyclinic" of the Presidential Administration, where accounting staff received 3 million rubles. salaries for long-retired employees.
In July 2009, the Federal Security Service of the Kurgan region opened a criminal case on the fact of embezzlement by employees of the regional narcological dispensary of more than 3 million rubles. Doctors made fake medical records for non-existent patients, for which medicines and amounts spent on "treatment" were written off.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru27.08.2010