On November 18, 2013, a New York Post story by John Crudele described how a Census Bureau employee falsified responses to a survey that measured the unemployment rate, among other things. Crudele reported that the falsified data may have boosted the unemployment rate in advance of the 2012 presidential election, and that the falsification occurred with the knowledge of senior Census Bureau employees. Crudele wrote:

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated. And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

The next day, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, U.S. Postal Service, and the Census Chairman Blake Farenthold, and Joint Economic Committee Chairman Kevin Brady wrote a letter to U.S. Census Bureau Director John Thompson requesting documents and information that would shed light on allegations of data falsification at the Census Bureau. The allegations of deliberate data falsification during the Current Population Survey (CPS) were particularly serious because the U.S. Department of Labor uses CPS data to generate the national unemployment rate, one of the principal measures of the nation’s economic health. The integrity of this data is crucial, as both government and the private sector rely heavily on it. The Census Bureau’s mission “is to serve as the leading source of quality data about the nation’s people and economy.” If true, the allegations of data falsification would call into question whether the Census Bureau was fulfilling its mission.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Joint Economic Committee jointly investigated the allegations. The findings in this report are based on the Committees’ review of thousands of documents obtained during the course of the joint investigation, as well as witness interviews. Documents and testimony obtained by the Committees did not show a link between the data falsification that occurred in the Philadelphia Regional Office and the national unemployment rate. The documents and testimony did show, however, that the Current Population Survey is vulnerable to data falsification and that the Census Bureau needs to make common sense reforms to protect the integrity of survey data.

 

See the entire report below in pdf format: