May 1 (Bloomberg) — There is no evidence government employees were instructed to falsify U.S. jobs statistics, an investigation by the Commerce Department's inspector general's office concluded today.
The investigators "found no evidence that management in the Philadelphia Regional Office instructed staff to falsify data at any time for any reason," according to the report. "Further, we found no evidence of systemic data falsification" in that office, and "no evidence that the national unemployment rate was manipulated."
A November article in the New York Post alleged that government officials had prevented an accurate tally of jobless figures in the months leading to the 2012 presidential election. Under pressure from supervisors to boost response rates in the Philadelphia region, Julius Buckmon, a former Census Bureau employee, said he made up information for people he couldn't reach two years before the election, according to the Post.
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The newspaper, citing an unnamed source, then said the practice went beyond a single employee, escalated in the year of the election and continued through the time of the story's publication.
The inspector general's office calculated that in order to manipulate the unemployment rate, "it would have taken 78 Census Bureau Field Representatives working together, in a coordinated way, to report each and every unemployed person included in their samples as 'employed' or 'not in labor force' during September 2012, an effort which likely would have been detected" by government "quality assurance" procedures.
The jobless rate unexpectedly dropped to 7.8 percent in September 2012 from 8.1 percent the month earlier, the Labor Department reported on Oct. 5 of that year, one month before the presidential election. The median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg at the time projected an increase to 8.2 percent.
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