A Japanese example of the second law

I notice that the Japanese Board of Audit has come up with yet more proof of another of Parkinson's laws - that government offices' spending continues to increase until it reaches the volume of their funding.

The Board of Audit examined the use of national government subsidies by 12 prefectural governments, and found accounting irregularities in all of them. The amount of money involved was particularly large in Aichi and Iwate prefectures. In these prefectures, it was common practice for many divisions to place fictitious orders with suppliers in order to make it look as if they had used up funds allocated to them by the end of each fiscal year.

Specifically, they placed fictitious orders with the suppliers at prices equal to their surplus money and asked the firms to keep the surplus money in a practice they called "depositing." If they use the money deposited with the suppliers to pay for goods they actually buy, they can preserve their surplus money beyond the fiscal year. Civil servants devoted a lot of time for such "work", reported the front-page Yoroku column in the Mainichi Shimbun



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