In November 2013, the New York Post provided evidence that the monthly unemployment numbers may have been rigged to help Obama win reelection. When the jobs report came out the first week of October of that year, reporting a drop from 8.1% to 7.8%, many people, including former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, believed the numbers were manipulated. The paper reported that the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, was aware of the manipulation.
According a whistle blower in the Denver office of the Census Bureau, that practice is still going on to this day.
A field supervisor in the Census Bureau’s Denver region has informed her organization’s higher-ups, the head of the Commerce Department and congressional investigators that she believes economic data collected by her office is being falsified.
And this whistleblower — who asked that I not identify her — said her bosses in Denver ignored her warnings even after she provided details of wrongdoing by three different survey takers.
The three continued to collect data even after she reported them.
When I spoke with this whistle blower earlier this year as part of my investigation of Census, she told me that hundreds of interviews that go into the Labor Department’s unemployment rate and inflation surveys would miraculously be completed just hours before deadline.
The implication was that someone with the ability to fill in the blanks on incomplete surveys was doing just that.
The Denver whistle blower also provided to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform the names of other Census workers who can spill the beans about data fraud in other regions.
Census is broken up into six regions. The Denver office covers Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
The Oversight Committee recently completed a report along with the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that verified one case of falsification in the Philly office. But the committee said it couldn’t prove or disprove that there was a nationwide pattern of data fraud because [The Dept. of] Commerce — which oversees Census — had “obstructed” its investigation.
“There are serious issues within the Census Bureau Denver regional office management and I feel it’s time that you are made aware of them,” the whistleblower wrote on Sept. 30 to Penny Pritzker, the head of Commerce, and Wayne Hatcher, associate director of Census Field operations.
That same information, along with about a thousand e-mails and other documents, was also sent to the Oversight Committee.
The case of falsified data in Philly — by a surveyor named Julius Buckmon — resulted in a lengthy investigation by Commerce’s Inspector General as well as the probe by the Oversight Committee and the Joint Economic Committee.
‘When the question is asked about data quality, my answer would be simple, there is none. I wouldn’t trust any data from the Census Bureau.’ – Denver whistleblower
Unemployment numbers are part of the basic reporting the federal government conducts for the American people. It looks as though the “most transparent administration in history” is giving the people fake info.
Cross-posted at The Lid
