Aoki Katsushika Ward Mayor’s Expenditure of Taxpayer Funds to “Not Seek Return of Public Funds” Revealed, Residents Furious

Journalist Mitsutoshi Abe’s “Cutting Through Local Politics!

A resident’s request for information has revealed that Katsushika Ward, Tokyo, has been using taxpayers’ money to enter into negotiated contracts that could be detrimental to the residents of the ward.

Katsunori Aoki, the mayor of Katsushika Ward, Tokyo, has been accused of mistakenly overpaying subsidies of approximately 510 million yen to private nursery schools in the ward.

The mayor of Katsunori Aoki’s Katsushika Ward was seeking a legal basis for not seeking the return of public funds that had been mistakenly paid out.

The information disclosure revealed that the mayor of Aoki Ward had been seeking a “legal basis for not seeking the return of public funds that were mistakenly paid. According to the specifications (contents) of the negotiated contract revealed by the disclosure of information

A legal basis for not requiring the nursery schools to return the overpaid subsidy due to a discrepancy in the calculation of the subsidy for private authorized nursery schools.

The contents of the issues that are expected to be raised in the residents’ lawsuit and the residents’ request for supervision will be presented.

The above two points were requested by the ward, and a Minato Ward law firm was contracted to meet these requirements.

One Katsushika Ward resident said

said, “It is only natural to ask for the return of public money that was remitted in error, and it is not right to use taxpayers’ money to hire an outside lawyer for a method that does not require the return of the money. It is a betrayal of the residents by the mayor.

The mayor’s betrayal of the residents is a breach of trust,” he said, his tone growing stronger.

The original mispayment of subsidies was the overpayment of a total of 511.81 million yen over a four-year period from fiscal 2006 to fiscal 2009 to subsidize licensed private preschools that hired part-time nursery school teachers in order to alleviate the shortage of staff at the preschools.

In one case, 72 of the 87 preschools in Katsushika City were paid twice as much as they should have been. In one case, the amount was about twice as much as it should have been. This was due to an error in the settings of newly introduced calculation software, which was discovered by a staff member in March of this year.

Since it is clear that the payments were made in error, the proper administrative procedure would have been to apologize to the nursery school staff and explain the situation, and then immediately request that the money be returned. However, when the problem first arose, there was a private meeting between Mayor Aoki and those involved in the nursery school, and Mayor Aoki quickly decided not to ask for the return of the money and informed those involved.
However, a ward official announced that he would seek the return of the money at the committee meeting, which caused a twist.

After a few rounds of “we will ask for it,” “we will not ask for it,” “we will still ask for it,” and “we will still ask for it.

After two or three changes, the decision was made to request the return. In the process, they concluded a voluntary contract with a private law firm, spending 1.1 million yen of public funds to seek a legal basis for not filing a claim, which had been the mayor’s policy.
Furthermore, the residents were

“It is also inexplicable that the district is tolerating such an unconvincing application from the nursery school, which is like a fraudulent application.”

The contents of the fraudulent application are…