Minister for Digital Transformation KONO, 2024, New Year's Comments

As we enter the new year of 2024, we would like to offer you our Happy New Year.

First of all, I would like to express my condolences to those who lost their lives in the 2024 Noto earthquake. At the same time, I would like to express my heartfelt sympathy to all those who were affected by the disaster.

Last year, it was confirmed that there was an error in linking the My Number, which is the foundation of the convenience of the people and the efficiency of the administration, with relevant information, which caused great inconvenience to everyone. With the cooperation of related organizations such as the local government, we were able to complete the full investigation of My Number information within last year.

As measures to prevent recurrence, we are revising ministerial ordinances to clarify that the My Number is required to be entered at the time of application procedures, and are renovating the J-LIS (local governments Information Systems Institute) system to prevent linking errors. Ultimately, in order to fundamentally prevent clerical errors and erroneous input of the My Number, we will consider enabling automatic input by reading the My Number from My Number Card's IC chips.

My Number Card has been acquired by more than 70% of the Japanese people, and about 70% of them have registered to use it as a health insurance card. In light of full investigation, we will stop issuing new health insurance card as scheduled in December this year and transition to a system based on an insurance card (Myina Insurance Card) using My Number Card. If you do not use a Myina Insurance Card, we will send you a confirmation of eligibility without application until you can no longer use health insurance card.

There may be some people who are used to using the conventional insurance card and are not in trouble, but the conventional insurance card will not lead to new development in the future. The Myina Health Insurance Card has many advantages for both the person himself and the medical care, such as improving the quality of the medical care based on the patient's drug information and medical information and preventing spoofs. In addition, the Myina Health Insurance Card will be the core of the spread and expansion of electronic prescriptions and electronic medical records in the future. We will seek the understanding of the people of the medical institutions and work with the relevant ministries and agencies to promote smooth transition to the Myina Health Insurance Card.

In addition, starting with this year's final tax return, we will take a big step toward "final tax return without writing." If your employer submits a tax withholding slips to the tax office online, information on employment income will be automatically entered in e-Tax through My Number Card cooperation using Mynaportal. In the future, we will aim to complete the final tax return by automatically entering various information in advance, and automatically calculating and confirming the results when you enter miscellaneous income, etc.

In addition to these efforts, in Digital Agency, we will continue to work on the promotion of "One-stop, no writing service" that does not require people to write the same thing over and over at the local government counter, the standardization of local government that leads to the reduction of the burden on core business systems and the improvement of services for residents, the review of regulations on paper and in-person processes that prevents digitalization, and the global involvement toward the realization of reliable and free data distribution (DFFT), so that we can realize a convenient life in safty and security using digital technology.

I would like to ask for your continued understanding and support this year as well.

Minister for Digital Transformation Kōnotaro