Gov’t unemployment data inaccurate, impairs decision-making – state comptroller

State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman pointed to serious deficiencies in the data available to the government on real-time unemployment rates in a report published on Thursday. The comptroller said the shortcoming leads to a gravely negative impact on the government’s decision-making.According to the report, the government should be receiving data on employers’ payments to the National Insurance Institute (NII) in real time rather than once every half a year, as is the current practice. The real-time reporting would enable the government to know the accurate number of employed people, their accurate salaries and the scope of job-seekers following the coronavirus pandemic.“This situation prevents real-time evaluation of the number of unemployed people who were put on unpaid leave as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, and harms the government’s ability to support citizens and provide incentives for returning to work,” the report stated.The report points to inconsistencies between the data available to the NII, the Employment Agency and the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) regarding the actual number of unemployed people in the Israeli economy, as each agency counts unemployment in a different manner. The inconsistencies have, at times, reached a rate of 100%.While the NII calculates the number of people who receive unemployment benefits according to the people who receive them, the Employment Agency counts them according to the requests that were made, and not necessarily according to those approved. The CBS has a different number, which was defined according to various polls it conducted.An example of such inconsistency occurred in April, when the CBS reported 1.413 million unemployed people, while the Employment Agency reported 1.125 million and the NII reported a mere 902,000, a total discrepancy of more than 50%.“There are significant gaps between the data available to all three entities – so much so, that according to the Employment Agency, the number of job-seekers during June was twice as big as the number presented by the Central Bureau of Statistics,” the report read. “The findings indicate a situation during which decision-makers don’t have real-time data at their disposal, resulting in financial aid being delayed or halted due to bureaucratic barriers… These are failures that can be addressed and fixed.”Thursday’s report is the first out of 15 special reports meant to examine the handling of the coronavirus pandemic by the State of Israel. Source