Foreigner Scrutiny At Nagoya Tax Bureaus

[Mulboyne]

Mainichi: 18 tax offices in 4 central Japan prefectures kept files on foreigners
Eighteen tax offices in four central Japan prefectures kept files on foreign residents, including their nationalities and alien registration numbers, the Mainichi learned on June 24. The Nagoya Regional Taxation Bureau says the 18 tax offices in Aichi, Shizuoka, Gifu and Mie prefectures compiled the files to avoid duplicate income tax return applications and to determine the identity of each foreign taxpayer. Foreign taxpayers, however, are not required to mention their nationalities and alien registration numbers in their income tax returns. The Japanese law on the protection of personal information held by administrative agencies only approves the holding of data necessary to conduct official business, and experts say the tax offices' actions may constitute a violation of that law...The tax offices kept files on foreigners of Japanese ancestry and Westerners, but did not do so on Chinese and others with names in Chinese kanji characters. The tax offices prepared the data based on information gleaned from income tax returns, and logged alien registration numbers only when foreign taxpayers used alien registration cards to identify themselves..."The tax offices kept files as a matter of convenience, probably because the names of foreigners are confusing. The files were not meant for tax probes," a Nagoya Regional Taxation Bureau representative said, adding that the files were destroyed at the end of March this year due to a switch to a nationwide tax data monitoring system. Meanwhile, a National Tax Agency official told the Mainichi, "Other tax offices are not keeping such files. The agency has never issued such an order"...more...

[Coligny]

Tax office... hoarding data ? color me un-surprised... They are second to only lawyers for this madness. The last 2 lawyer offices I deployed some data base with had paper archive of everything, files from wall to ceiling even in the loo. I wonder how the building was still standing with such a dangerous overload (ask an architect or a moving company: buks and paper archives are evil...)

[plaid_knight]

And that is why we deserve the right to write our "strange, foreign" names in Kanji on official documents.

[matsuki]

"The tax offices kept files as a matter of convenience, probably because the names of foreigners are confusing."

LOL, like it's better to have 9,999,999,999,999 Yuka Tanaka's in Japan and try to figure out who is who?

And that is why we deserve the right to write our "strange, foreign" names in Kanji on official documents.

Indeed, if it's on everything else, why not?