Acting on a tip-off, Japanese Ministry of Transport officials conducted a raid at Mitsubishi Motors in mid-2000. They found thousands of reports of customer complaints about potentially serious vehicle defects hidden in an employee locker room. They should have been reported to the Ministry of Transport which is responsible for coordinating and supervising recalls and free repairs. A few weeks later, Mitsubishi announced that its internal investigation showed that the practice of not reporting serious customer complaints to the Ministry of Transport had been occurring since 1969 and senior Mitsubishi executives had been aware of it, but done nothing to stop it. Apparently, Mitsubishi staff wanted to avoid the embarrassment and cost of recalls.

Mitsubishi's legal responsibility was clear. So was their social responsibility. Faults and serious complaints about their vehicles from individual consumers should have been reported to the Ministry of Transport. They should then have been stored in the company's quality guarantee section, where Ministry of Transport officials could annually inspect the complaints register. Instead, according to newspaper reports, Mitsubishi repair Workshops would make covert repairs for individual complainants, before there was a chance to conduct an investigation as to whether there should be a recall. The complaints were then hidden or ‘misplaced’ in codenamed files, so that Ministry of Transport inspections of Mitsubishis complaints handling procedures would not find them. By the end of August, Mitsubishi had had to recall more than a million vehicles that should have been recalled earlier.