Last November, New York Post columnist John Crudele wrote that a sharp drop in the jobless rate in September 2012 may have been caused by one or more Census Bureau employees fabricating responses to the government's monthly jobs survey. The unemployment rate is calculated by the Labor Department based on a Census survey of 60,000 households.
Crudele quoted a former Philadelphia area survey worker who admitting fabricating data in 2010.
EARLIER STORY: Census Bureau says no systematic manipulation of data
But in a report released Thursday, Commerce's inspector general said that falsifying the unemployment rate would have required a conspiracy among 78 field representatives in the Philadelphia office. They would have had to work together, "in a coordinated way, to report each and every unemployed person included in their sample as 'employed' or 'not in the labor force' " that month. Such an effort "likely would have been detected" by the Census Bureau's quality assurance procedures, the report said.
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It adds that the drop in the unemployment rate in September 2012 — from 8.1% to 7.8% — was "consistent with other indicators" of the labor market, including employment estimates by Moody's Analytics and payroll processor ADP.
The inspector general does conclude that Census' system for identifying and addressing data falsification "creates the potential for conflicts of interest" because the same supervisors who could order manipulation are responsible for reporting any instances of it. The report recommends that Census use "an independent system to check for falsification."
The report also found that survey manuals and training materials "are! outdated, inconsistent, and do not discuss prohibitions and serious consequences for falsifying survey data.
"We recommend that they be corrected to include information about detecting and dealing with falsification when it occurs."
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