translated from Spanish: INE’s Director delivers detail on the prices of the products that were handled in the IPC

The director of the National Institute of Statistics (INE), Gu Illermo Pattillo visited, for the second time in the week, the Congress to explain to the parliamentarians of the Senate economy Commission the details that led the agency to alert on indications of manipulation to the consumer price Index (IPC).
Patillo indicated that in August 2018, the first month where manipulations were detected, 626 price records were “adjusted”, corresponding to 11 products that make up the IPC basket.
According to the newspaper El Mercurio, 138 of these records were price manipulation of “disposable diapers”, 114 were “skin creams”, 103 “deodorants and antiperspirants” and 100 of the item “oranges”.
Oranges are not the only edible product that underwent manipulation. There are also the products “fish” (47), “Lemon” (39), “Pork Meat” (13), “Beef” (12) and “Chicken Meat” (11).
The other two products with modified prices are “colonies and perfumes”, with 46, and “soda drink”, with 3.
According to the presentation of Pattillo, the modality used for the adjustment was to assign the “code 201”, which deals with the variety temporarily exhausted in the current period, to boost the prices. “This allocation is not necessarily invalid, so it was revised if its application followed the established protocols,” he said.
This review found that the discretionary allocation of codes 201 to products that did not correspond was evidenced, since the prices were already raised. “Management decisions (apparently) were taken unidirectionally and after knowing the original figure on a calculation that was already squared and without any evidence of anomalies that require subsequent reviews,” he added.

Original source in Spanish