Japan Tax Official Dismissed for Fraud, Tax Evasion

Tokyo, Aug. 7 (Jiji Press)–Japanese tax authorities on Friday dismissed a 25-year-old official for allegedly defrauding a wealthy elderly woman he was auditing of a large amount of cash and evading taxes on gambling winnings obtained with the stolen money. The Kantoshinetsu Regional Taxation Bureau slapped Yasunari Matsuo with disciplinary dismissal. Authorities referred the official to prosecutors on suspicion of fraud and filed a criminal complaint for violating the income tax law. Matsuo reportedly said that he was unable even to make a living because he was addicted to gambling on boat races. According to the announcement by the office, Matsuo is suspected of defrauding a woman in the city of Saitama of about 850,000 yen between December 2023 and January 2026. He allegedly told the woman that there were additional taxes that needed to be paid, due to an error in a declaration document. Matsuo also allegedly failed to report some 334 million yen of income in time during the three years through 2025, including winnings from gambling, resulting in tax evasion of about 135 million yen. Since November 2022, the official is believed to have received cash from the woman every time he visited her home, with the money totaling about 150 million yen. He allegedly lied to her, saying that he needed to send money to his parents, but he used it for other purposes, including purchases of betting tickets for boat races. Matsuo is also said to have borrowed money from colleagues to bet on boat races. When a supervisor warned him, Matsuo said that he had quit gambling and that he had no debt. Yoshiaki Shuto, chief of the general affairs department of the Kantoshinetsu Regional Taxation Bureau, said in a statement that the office took the incident seriously and would take measures to prevent a recurrence. The incident is part of a series of scandals involving tax officials, including a leak of taxpayer information and a case of an official engaging in sugar daddy dating. “Unprecedented cases of malicious scandals are occurring one after another,” a senior tax official said. “The situation is eroding trust in tax administration.” According to the National Personnel Authority, 37 tax officials received disciplinary action in 2025. This year, 20 people had been disciplined as of March. In May, a female official in her 20s at a tax office in Saitama was given a pay cut for receiving a total of roughly 2.3 million yen while working at a call-girl business and going on sugar daddy dates with about 30 people she met through social media. She said that she wanted to raise money in order to support a little-known idol, and she resigned from her job. Meanwhile, it emerged in April that an examiner in his 30s at the Osaka Regional Taxation Bureau leaked 259 items of information, including businesses’ and individuals’ names, via the Line messaging app after a man posing as a police officer in Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo, told him by phone that he was under investigation. Taxpayers whose information was leaked said that they had since received phone calls believed to be from scammers. The examiner resigned after being suspended. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]