Page 246 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS224 Jorge T. et al.
 better use of public statistics.
Nevertheless, under certain circumstances, these three advantages could
become a disadvantage to a National Statistical Office, specifically, as
7
described by Seltzer (1994) , when the political power intends to institutionally
undermine an NSO. Even more so if the superior entity is the most affected by
the uncomfortable truths told by the NSO in terms of social or economic
performance.
According to the current governance structure, INDEC acts under the
Ministry of Treasury, which in turn operates under the authority of the Nation's
President. This means that INDEC tells “uncomfortable truths” that reflect the
performance of many of its direct superior’s policies. Thus, the Institute
assumes an internal and external evaluating role, since, while the President of
the Republic is accountable to society, the Minister of Treasury is accountable
to the President. The structure described above could generate several
conflicts among the parties involved, according to the so called “agency
theory”. It must be noted that this is not currently the case.
In this sense, functional dependence from ministries in charge of economic
policies implies several eventual drawbacks for an NSO, such as:
1. Intrusion of political officials who may want to implement
methodological changes or ask for specific revisions of the NSO’s
statistical data.
2. Pressure through budgetary subordination.
3. Biases both in the definition of priorities and of the main features
of certain statistical operations, with the risk of having the
ministry’s interests privileged over statistical objectives.
4. Damage to user trust in the NSO’s statistical production due to the
direct dependence from the ministry.
Beside the above-mentioned disadvantages, there are others that also
impact negatively on INDEC’s degrees of freedom as regards its operational
and administrative management. A deconcentrated entity has administrative
disadvantages that hinder its daily activities due to bureaucratic and
administrative procedures that require authorisation by the superior entity,
such as:

7 According to Seltzer (1994), there are several ways to undermine the professional integrity
and credibility of statistical agencies. Generally, the specific threats to statistics affect a wide
variety of dimensions, such as: 1) the mission of the statistical service, 2) the financial
resources and controls, 3) staff, 4) suppression or modification of statistical fields or series,
5) definitions, concepts and methodology, 6) terms and nomenclature, 7) altering specific
numbers, 8) the extent and timing of the release of data, 9) threats to data confidentiality,
10) use of agency for political analysis or other political uses, and 11) active campaign to
discredit statistical outputs, methods or staff.
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