Govn't thieves announce they're now stealing 90% less

[Taro Toporific]

Social Insurance Agency's Tokyobureau cuts taxi expenses by 90%
Yomiuri On-Line, Dec 5
.... the savings for the Social Insurance Agency's Tokyo bureau for late-night taxi fares fell by about 90 percent over the year to September due to cost-cutting effort...bureau instructed its 396 employees to leave work in time to make the last train or stay overnight at the bureau when they had to work overtime. As a result, taxi expenses decreased to 570,000 yen between October 2003 and March 2004.

[Mulboyne]

Yomiuri: Local govt officials 'outearn private counterparts'
Local government employees in every prefecture except Tokyo are being paid more than their equivalents in the private sector, according to a Finance Ministry survey obtained by The Yomiuri Shimbun. Nationwide, an average local government civil servant earns about 14 percent more than the average salaried worker. The biggest disparity of nearly 30 percent in the bureaucrats' favor was reported in Okinawa and Yamagata prefectures, the survey found. But despite the disparities, no prefectural governments plan to redress the salary differential, ministry officials said.
The ministry suspects local governments of having padded their respective fiscal programs--which are used as a yardstick to determine the amount of central government grants from income tax revenues to local authorities--to partly finance officials' salaries. The padded amount is estimated to total 7 trillion yen to 8 trillion yen a year, the officials said. The ministry plans to ask local governments nationwide to thoroughly review the salary levels of their employees.