TATERU falsified 350 loan files — and had hushed a prior bank discovery

On December 27, 2018, TATERU — a Tokyo Stock Exchange first-section-listed apartment construction and management company that had grown revenue 77% to ¥67 billion in the year to December 2017 — announced that falsifications had been found in 350 loan files: staff had inflated applicants' deposit balances and submitted copies of other people's bankbooks as customers' own, to squeeze bigger loans out of banks. Of 2,269 properties examined by its lawyer-led special investigation committee, 15% were tainted; 31 sales employees, 6% of the workforce, were found involved.

The cover-up history was the sharpest finding. Falsification had begun around 2010 — rampant since before the company's 2015 Mothers listing. Years before the listing, a financial institution had already discovered document tampering and halted transactions; TATERU treated it as individual misconduct, had executives announce a ban internally, and conducted no investigation. The fraud simply continued.

The committee pointed to a sales department of rigid hierarchy where 'subordinates must obey superiors' and speaking frankly upward was hard: documents were doctored to close contracts with customers who had too little money, chasing excessive quotas. No evidence tied president-level management to the falsifications.

The fallout reached the board: managing director Satoshi Koga, who oversaw sales, resigned the same day, while president Koki Furuki and eight other directors accepted 10–50% pay cuts for three to six months. TATERU apologized and promised whistleblowing and compliance fixes. The scandal also fed the wider collapse of Japan's apartment-loan boom — the Suruga Bank forgery affair among unlisted brokers was already public — prompting the land ministry to launch an industry-wide survey from fiscal 2019.

A bank had caught TATERU's document tampering years before its listing and froze transactions — and the company chose an internal ban over an investigation.

The sales department's strict top-down culture and quota pressure made falsifying files the standard way to close deals with underfunded customers.

Falsifications ran from around 2010 through the 2015 listing to 2018, meaning the misconduct predated and outlived the company's public-market debut.

The company's growth story — revenue up 77% to ¥67 billion in FY2017 — was built on the same apartment-loan boom the forgeries were feeding.

Treating a fraud discovery as one bad employee's sin guarantees the second act: TATERU's first bank bust-up drew an internal memo, not an investigation, so the files kept multiplying.

TATERU announced disciplinary action on December 27, 2018 — one managing director gone, ten directors' pay cut — alongside recurrence-prevention measures. Regulators widened the lens: the land ministry began surveying the sublease and apartment-loan industry from fiscal 2019, and the broader lending boom kept shrinking, with bank apartment loans down 14% year on year in late 2018.