Japanese police have searched the city hall of the prefectural capital of Toyama, central Japan, over the suspected padding of the city’s population for the 2025 national census.
Ten investigators from the Toyama prefectural police entered the Toyama City Hall on Saturday morning for a search of the division that handles the census.
Police say they searched for three hours and seized documents related to the census, as well as records of internal communications.
The move comes after the national internal affairs ministry filed a criminal complaint with the prefectural police on Tuesday over a suspected violation of the Statistics Act.
The ministry alleges that unidentified Toyama City staff overreported the city’s population in the census last year, by adding households with no actual residents.
The ministry and…
PAYROLL & HR CONTROLS (PREVENTING “GHOST” SCHEMES)
Payroll fraud is often the hardest to detect because it “looks” like a normal business expense.
- Segregation of Duties (SoD): The person who adds new employees to the system must not be the same person who approves the monthly pay run.
- Mandatory Vacation Policy: Require all financial and HR staff to take 5–10 consecutive days of leave annually. Fraud often surfaces when the perpetrator isn’t there to “hide” the trail.
- Ghost Employee Audit: Perform a quarterly “Headcount Reconciliation” where managers must physically verify every name on their payroll list exists.
- Self-Pay Blocking: Ensure the payroll software has a hard-coded block preventing administrators from editing their own salary or bank details.