The Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) has decided to conduct a special inspection into suspicions that there were some statistical distortions during the Moon Jae-in administration. Specifically, the auditor will investigate whether crucial statistics on income and employment were distorted or doctored and whether the liberal government, which will end its five-year term May 9, intervened in those processes.
The inspection is long overdue, considering that the main opposition People Power Party demanded that the suspected data doctoring be scrutinized in February last year. It's not difficult to identify the most notorious examples in which the government has caused side effects with wrongheaded policies and masked them through the distortion of data.
Take the current government's signature income-led growth policy, for instance. As the income gap widened to its worst level as a result of the failed policy, state-funded think tanks allegedly took the cue from the presidential office and reprocessed income data by individuals instead of by households to draw a distorted conclusion that “only the top 10 percent of workers suffered a cut in income.” President Moon even changed the head of Statistics Korea in response to unwanted data findings. The new head of the statistics office made it impossible to compare income data of the previous governments with that of the incumbent administration by altering the number of samples, response periods and methodologies.
Tax money could have been used to doctor job data. Capitalizing on the statistical loophole that people who work for at least one hour a week are considered employed, the government has produced various kinds of public part-time jobs. This was needed for the administration to claim that “employment has recovered.”
Needless to say, the right policies are possible only when they are based on accurate and objective statistics. The Moon administration has come under fire for setting ideologically biased policy goals first and doctoring data to justify them. That's probably why its policies have failed repeatedly without being corrected. To make the right policies, the incoming Yoon Suk-yeol government should straighten out some distorted statistics first.