[lbo-talk] Does God Work at the BLS?

Brad Mayer Bradley.Mayer at Sun.COM
Mon Mar 8 15:40:47 PST 2004


"The nearly three-week delay for the January report is unheard of in the government's statistics system."

But we will have producer prices "someday, God willing".

Latest in the delay of the PeePeeEye saga/mystery:

REUTERS) US Labor Dept blames aging computers for PPI delay

By Andrea Hopkins

WASHINGTON, March 8 (Reuters) - Outdated computers are partly to blame for the delayed release of the U.S. producer price index and only "God knows when" the data will be ready, a top analyst at the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Monday.

The U.S. Labor Department statistical agency has indefinitely delayed the release of the January and February PPI reports due to problems converting the data to a new industry classification system.

The January PPI, which measures prices paid to farms, factories and refineries, was originally scheduled for release on Feb. 19. The February report was due to be released this coming Friday.

The nearly three-week delay for the January report is unheard of in the government's statistics system. Some economists said they miss the wholesale price data, in part because it can offer early clues on profits and, by extension, hiring.

Irwin Gerduk, assistant commissioner for BLS' PPI section, said the January and February data will be released in separate reports as soon as accurate data can be calculated. "A January index will be released first -- God knows when -- and some time subsequent to that there would be a February index release," Gerduk said, adding that it would take "quite a bit of time" to produce the February report even after the calculation problems were solved in the January report. Gerduk said several problems arose in an attempt to switch the PPI to the North American Industry Classification System from the Standard Industrial Classification -- a process already completed for most U.S. data series.

He said while other series needed only to reclassify industries, PPI had to remap some 40,000 industry units and about 120,000 items before reaggregating the data into four indexes that are produced each month as part of PPI.

"MULTITUDE OF PROBLEMS" Worse still, Gerduk said the aging computers at BLS were not capable of handling a dry run of the reclassified data, so analysts could only begin computing the January data once the December report was published.

"It wasn't a single problem, it was a multitude of problems. It was the complexity of the conversion itself, tied to the fact we had 30-year-old systems that were never designed to handle a widespread classification conversion," he said. "So you're basically doing everything at the last minute."



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