Jakarta, Indonesia ? With workers still finding bodies under mud-caked rubble a month after a tsunami, Indonesia’s Health Ministry revised its casualty count Tuesday, lowering confirmed deaths to 96,000 but raising the number of missing, and presumed dead, to 132,000.

Officials conceded a precise total would never be known, and the ministry said its death count now included only buried bodies and excluded any missing.

People still missing after a year will be declared dead, it said.

The Health Ministry’s new procedure brought its numbers in line with another government agency tallying the dead, the National Disaster Relief Coordinating Board.

“The minister ordered us to do this to avoid confusion,” said Dr. Doti Indrasanto, the Health Ministry official in charge of the death count. “People have been complaining.”

But there were still discrepancies about deaths in both Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the two worst-hit countries. Government ministries have provided conflicting figures, reflecting the difficulties of finding, identifying, counting and burying the bodies from the Dec. 26 disaster.

Indonesia’s Social Affairs Ministry, which conducts its own casualty tally, raised its estimate of dead by 9,000 Tuesday to a total of 123,198.

In Sri Lanka, officials asked President Chadrika Kumaratunga to sort out differences between one ministry’s tally of 38,195 dead and another’s of 30,957.

The latest figures put the overall death toll, excluding the missing, across the 11-nation disaster zone between 143,877 and 178,081.