translated from Spanish: INE Director: “We detected indications of IPC manipulation”

Through a press release, Guillermo Patillo, director of the National Institute of Statistics (INE), revealed that “indications of manipulation of the consumer Price Index (IPC)” were detected. In this sense, he noted that this would have affected the months of August and probably September of 2018. “In February 2019 the second half I asked the technical unit to revise the calculation procedure and system of the process under which we estimate the IPC. This review process culminated a couple of days ago, “he continued. “Until now a process that continues the background we have tells us that this would have happened in the calculation of the index and its variation for the months of August, possibly September 2018,” he said. With this, he added that “obviously as soon as this process is over we will report your results so just there we will be able to confirm or not if this irregularity we have detected is repeated in some other month. (…) There is no evidence of another month involved. After that we could say that it happened. ” “Studies indicate that there is the possibility and probability that this has caused both activity in those months a difference no more than 0.1 percentage point of the CPI variation rate,” he added, and confirmed that the background was put to Provision of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and an internal summary was also instructed.

Original source in Spanish