HIS has announced that it determined some parts of the Employment Adjustment Subsidies it received were improper, and on January 22, it received a notice of cancellation of the subsidy decision and a return notification.
A total of 6,254,519,769 yen for Employment Adjustment Subsidies and 1,951,278 yen for Emergency Employment Stabilization Subsidies, amounting to 6,256,471,047 yen, will be voluntarily returned.
HIS had been receiving Employment Adjustment Subsidies from March 2020 to December 2022. On April 23, 2024, information was provided to Deloitte, HIS’s accounting auditor, suggesting there were cases where the subsidies were received for days employees were actually working as non-working days.
In response, HIS formed an investigation team, and from April to mid-June, conducted investigations targeting work emails and chats of internal personnel with external specialists, and scrutinized the analysis results. Initial investigations also included interviews with internal personnel, cross-referencing the attendance system with the subsidy application details, and a survey to all employees.
Although no facts suggesting fraudulent receipt were found, it became clear that there was work done on some of the non-working days for which subsidies were applied, so on June 24, HIS visited the Tokyo Labor Bureau, offering to return amounts determined as improper by HIS based on the initial investigation results.
However, the Tokyo Labor Bureau indicated that the initial investigation results were insufficient as a basis for determining refund amounts. Therefore, from September, HIS consulted with Anderson Mori & Tomotsune law firm attorneys, had meetings with the Tokyo Labor Bureau, and conducted objective data acquisition and scrutiny.
As a result, it was determined that employees worked on over 20% of the non-working days for which subsidies were claimed, and since HIS claimed subsidies on a daily basis, if there was any work done on the claimed day, even if it was a short task like replying to an email, the entire amount received for that day’s application must be returned as it did not reflect the actual situation.
During the period, HIS received a total of 24,066,023,578 yen for Employment Adjustment Subsidies and 198,580,822 yen for Emergency Employment Stabilization Subsidies.
