"More shady dealings found in program for foreign trainees", 8 October 2019

Government officials said they have uncovered…secret arrangements…made by at least two Japanese agencies that help place foreign internees with companies in Japan, and organizations in Vietnam that recruit and send interns to Japan.

…The Immigration Services Agency and the labor ministry plan to rescind their approval for operations given to two agencies, one based in Chiba Prefecture and the other in Saitama Prefecture. The Vietnamese government also plans to retract its approval of two organizations that send out interns…

…The Chiba agency signed a contract in July 2018 with the Vietnamese organization, but the two sides also exchanged a “memorandum” that served as a secret agreement.

One provision of the memorandum called for the Chiba agency to receive compensation if interns go missing from their training location.

…If the intern disappeared in the first year of the program, the agency would receive 300,000 yen ($2,800) from the Vietnamese organization…The price was 200,000 yen for disappearances in the second year or later.

The actual contract stipulated that the Chiba agency was to pay 15,000 yen per intern as a training fee to the Vietnamese organization…

However, the secret agreement waived any responsibility for the Chiba agency to pay that fee.

Immigration Services Agency officials suspect this and other Vietnamese organizations overcharge prospective interns to collect funds needed to pay kickbacks and other compensation to the Japanese agencies.

…One provision had the Vietnamese organization returning the entire amount the Saitama agency paid for training fees…

The brunt of the burden falls on…prospective technical interns who often have to take out loans to cover the large fees required to apply for entry into the technical intern training program…