(Canadian Press)
Canada's new
customs agency has produced erroneous trade figures at least twice in recent months, newly disclosed documents show, raising questions about the reliability of key government statistics.
The last time
the Canada Border Services Agency made the error, it created a buzz in financial circles and sent the Canadian dollar on a wild ride.
The repeated mistakes have also strained the agency's relationship
with Statistics Canada, whose credibility was undermined by the rogue trade numbers.
"We rely a great deal upon the word of Customs and Border Services and ... November's neglect was the second
occasion in the past six months on which they provided an incomplete dataset," says an internal StatsCan memo, dated Jan. 26.
On Jan. 12, Statistics Canada released November trade data that
showed a precipitous 10 per cent drop in U.S. imports to Canada, a potential sign of recession.
The numbers also indicated the American trade deficit had risen higher than expected, prompting currency
traders to abandon the U.S. greenback and boost the loonie by as much as 1.6 cents. Trouble is, the figures were wrong.
Canada Border Services shut down its computer system on Nov. 25 to install
upgrades, then forgot to turn it back on. And so all of Canada's import data for that day - for technical reasons, the 25th of each month normally produces big import numbers - was left unrecorded.
Internal documents obtained under the Access to Information Act show Statistics Canada twigged to the possible error after noting the unusual drop in imports, and alerted Border Services on Dec. 8. But
continuing miscommunication and missteps between the two agencies failed to resolve the apparent discrepancy in time for the Jan. 12 release date.
The missing import data finally arrived in the last
week of January, and the correct numbers were released Jan. 31 with a note referring to a previous "technical problem."
In fact, it was a case of human error at Canada Border Services - the
second in the last seven months. The border agency carried out a similar computer upgrade on the weekend of Sept. 11-12, then failed to restore the system, lost a week's worth of import data and delivered
erroneous numbers to StatsCan later that month.
"Our checks caught the first incident," says the Jan. 26 StatsCan memo. "We were then able to communicate to Customs and Border Services
that they needed to locate and transmit this data."
Canada Border Services has since been hit with a virus that knocked out its computer network during the last week of March this year, forcing
officials to record import data by hand. The affected numbers include those from March 25, the busiest day.
Statistics Canada is working with the agency to ensure that those trade numbers will be
reliable. A spokesman for StatsCan blamed some of the missteps in the Nov. 25 incident on the difficult process of splitting the old Canada Customs and Revenue Agency into two agencies, the Canada Revenue
Agency and Canada Border Services, announced Dec. 12, 2003.
"They went through this divorce process," said David Dodds. "They've had a lot of movement of staff, so I think we became
...less careful than we should have been to make sure that we still knew exactly who the new people were and exactly who to call."
But a border services spokesman rejected that explanation,
saying turnover was no different from that in any large organization.
Chris Kealey also said that Statistics Canada never gave any indication that it needed the missing Nov. 25 data right away.
"They didn't give us a deadline," he said.
Both spokesmen said they have since worked out failsafe procedures to ensure the errors are not repeated. They added that no one has asked for
compensation for the foul up. |
