Statistics Fraud

Statistics can be manipulated - and falsified. That's exactly what happened recently in Kenya. Managers at the Department of Statistic in Kenya, Africa, falsified data on a poverty indexing report to gain federal funding. How many people will use these statistics for statistical correlations in future data never realizing that the data was falsified?

Africa isn't the only continent where the intoxication of manipulating statistics became too hard to resist. The Human Rights Statistics in China reported that the National Bureau of Statistics in China has had some of their government employees fiddling with the numbers.

Europe apparently didn't want to be left out of the numbers-playing game. Reports started back in 2003 about fraud at Eurostat, and across the ocean the United States San Francisco Health Department falsified HIV statistics.

How many statistical reports have these falsifications been innocently inoculated into?

It would be interesting to see a visual on flow of data from the reports that were falsified.

Statistics never did depict reality anyway.

Here's some links to National and International Government Statistic Agencies:

United Nations Statistic Division

International Statistical Agencies listing from the US Census Bureau

Department of Labor Statistical Websites Around the World

You can't always trust the government and you can't always believe what you read. As if we didn't already know that.