In an explosive report published Monday at the New York Post, John Crudele said a Census Bureauemployee admitted the jobs report released just prior to the 2012 election was faked. Worse yet, the employee said he was told to cook the books.
Crudele said the drop -- from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September -- raised eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.
At the time, former General Electric CEO Jack Welchwas castigated as a conspiracy theorist for suggesting something was wrong.
"Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers," hetweeted at the time.
But it now appears he was right.
According to Crudele, the employee caught faking the numbers is Julius Buckmon, who reportedly said he was told to do by higher-ups.
“It was a phone conversation — I forget the exact words — but it was, ‘Go ahead and fabricate it’ to make it what it was,” Buckmon supposedly told Crudele.
Crudele explained that interviews with some 60,000 households are used to tabulate the jobless numbers every month.
"Since this is considered a scientific poll, each one of the households interviewed represents 5,000 homes in the US," he said.
Buckmon, being a "very ambitious employee," conducted three times as many interviews as his fellow workers, Crudele said.
But by creating workers out of thin air, he added, Buckmon could have lowered the actual jobless rate.
Buckmon reportedly admitted filling out the surveys for people he couldn't reach, but was never told how to answer the questions indicting if the people were employed, looking for work, or had quit looking and left the workforce.
"But," Crudele said, "people who know how the survey works say that simply by creating people and filling out surveys in their name would boost the number of folks reported as employed."
The falsification was never disclosed, and the Census Bureau never informed the Department of Laborthat the data was faulty.
“Yes, absolutely they should have told us,” a Labor spokesman said. “It would be normal procedure to notify us if there is a problem with data collection.”
Internal documents revealed that a handful of incidents were investigated by the Census Bureau, but over a dozen instances were reported.
Crudele said that he's been suspicious of the Census Bureau "for a long time," and has offered to give all the information he has to the Labor Department inspector general.
"I’m waiting to hear back from Labor," he said, adding hopes that Congress would look into the matter.
Manipulation of data like this, he explained, "not only gives voters the wrong impression of the economy but also leads lawmakers, the Federal Reserve and companies to make uninformed decisions."
For example, he said, "the Fed is targeting the curtailment of its so-called quantitative easing money-printing/bond-buying fiasco to the unemployment rate for which Census provided the false information."
Falsifying employment numbers like this, he added, would have dire consequences for the country.
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