A total of 131 chartered accountants reaffirmed their faith in government data on Monday and rejected recent claims by some economists and social scientists that official statistics were being fudged.
"Even international agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund confirm data given by government agencies. Therefore, it is apparent that opposition parties had choreographed the entire move," they said in a signed statement.
The new GDP series introduced is compliant with the United Nations guidelines in System of National Accounts 2008 for the first time, said the chartered accountants. It takes information for the corporate sector and has better estimates of the unorganised sector on unincorporated enterprises, as well as data on sales and service taxes.
"Changing of GDP base year is a regular feature. Instead of taking issue with specific areas, a general bunch of allegations has been made. This leaves one guessing about the motivation of the signatories."
The professionals said data revisions are part of a healthy practice to balance between timeliness and accuracy. For example, all data sources have their bases changed at periodic intervals as well as a provisional and final data.
Such revisions are not statistics in shambles, but a reflection of robustness of the process within the limitation of size and scale of data collection., they said.
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