A ruckus has erupted at a high school in the southern part of the island after up to ¥6.7 million yen of an alumni reunion fund was found unaccounted for.

The Ryukyu Shinpo Newspaper has investigated the case and interviewed several people involved and familiar with the matter. According to the newspaper, a woman in her 40’s who had been in charge of the PTA accounting and the alumni reunion fund between 1993 and April in 2014, was found to have canceled the fund account. She claims that she threw away the fund’s old account passbooks last year. She has also said that there are very few receipts concerning the fund left.

According to a person knowledgeable of the matter, there was about ¥1.2 million in a newly opened account in May last year.  Although about ¥8 million in total has been collected for the fund as of now, there are receipts totaling only for ¥120,000.

The woman canceled several PTA accounts in January last year as well, and says she threw the passbooks away.

School officials uncovered several suspicious and murky details between PTA financial records and former transactions when they investigated the bank records between 2009 and 2013.

The woman responded to Ryukyu Shinpo questions and reportedly said, “I thought it was up to my judgment if we needed to keep the passbooks or throw them away. When we used the alumni reunion fund for school activities, we handed over the money directly to people affiliated with the activities and did not make receipts. So, I have not diverted any funds.”

The school principal says, “We normally do not cancel accounts. There’s no way that someone can throw passbooks away in any circumstances.”

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