Law enforcers are stepping up their crackdown on administrative scriveners who help foreigners illegally work or get falsely married in Japan, officials said.
The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has set up a liaison council with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the Justice Ministry’s Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau to deal with the matter.
Since 2006, the MPD has arrested at least five administrative scriveners for helping foreigners illegally obtain work visas in Japan in violation of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law.
However, a senior investigator with the MPD admits that it has been forced to abandon forming a case against many others suspected of filing false applications for work visas on behalf of foreigners, because they denied that their clients were seeking false applications.
To deal with the situation, the MPD is trying to invoke a law to regulate the work of administrative scriveners.
Many administrative scriveners who are suspected of involvement in false applications fail to preserve documents recording the names and addresses of their clients and the amounts of fees they receive from their clients, even though the law requires them to do so. Violators face a fine of up to 1 million yen.
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