'Fake census' officers may be criminally liable

Frontline census officers accused of faking answers in an apparent bid to speed up their work could be criminally liable, and the commissioner says she will lead a task force investigating the case.

But lawmakers said the Census and Statistics Department probe was not enough and called for an independent inquiry.

It came after reports in Ming Pao newspaper alleging that as many as nine out of 10 frontline offers fabricated answers over the past 10 years to improve efficiency - and their performance reports. Former officers said it was common practice to make up answers, and that errors found in household survey interviews were often ignored.

The allegations have sparked fears that policies and decisions concerning resource allocation have been, and will be, made based on false numbers.

One former officer, responsible for general household surveys, said that when he did telephone interviews following up on information collected from field surveys, he found deviations, but they were ignored.

"My interviewee would not say whether she was a housewife and whether she was seeking employment, but [the field interviewer] had written that she was a housewife and not seeking employment," the officer told a radio programme yesterday. He said he informed his boss of the discrepancies and was told: "You can't complain about this. This is just how they do it, just ignore it."