Provisional Translation

Q.

The supplemental budget was passed today and a variety of measures were incorporated therein, including a special benefit, a subsidy for businesses and an employment adjustment subsidy, and there are growing calls to get this cash out as quickly as possible. What issues do you think are involved in rapidly implementing the budget you just mentioned and how should these be addressed in future?

A.

The passage of the budget is just the very first step for the Ministry of Finance and, with this done, the budget can in fact be implemented starting tomorrow by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare along with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, prefectural and municipal governments, and, on our part, government-affiliated financial institutions, the Japan Finance Corporation and other banks. For the Japan Finance Corporation (JFC), for example, to put this into motion, guarantees, documents and various other things will be needed to ensure that money is forthcoming from the JFC, so to help things go as smoothly and as hassle-free as possible, and to establish one-stop operations where applicants do not have to go to the JFC and then to a guarantee association and then to a local shinkin bank and fill out the same three forms three different times, and because people are most accustomed to dealing with a shinkin bank or their regular bank, arrangements should be made with a person from that bank to prepare the documents, to go together with that person to the guaranty association, and then take the documents to the JFC; these can be simply handed over without having to devote a great deal of time and effort because they were prepared by someone familiar with JFC procedures, and this means people will not have to crowd in and it will make the process easier to complete in many ways. We have been told that some people have already taken these steps, and in order to avoid the JFC being swamped by applicants and the 3Cs (closed, crowded, close-contact), we are now taking a variety of approaches to these steps.