December 28, 2017 Response to NHK Employee’s Embezzlement of Reception Fees

On December 21, 2017, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (also called NHK) disclosed an NHK Nagoya Station employee’s embezzlement of NHK reception fees. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications thinks that this was nothing short of the significant impairment of public confidence in NHK as Japan’s national public broadcasting organization supported by reception fees. In light of the purpose of the Broadcast Act, the Director-General for Information and Communications Bureau verbally warned NHK to prevent this kind of situation from occurring in the future, and requested NHK to conduct a total inspection on NHK’s overall work related to its contracts and collection of reception fees, take drastic measures to prevent the recurrence of such a deplorable event, report and publish the contents of NHK’s measures by the end of February 2018.