NEW DELHI: The government is considering bringing out a white paper on what went wrong with the exports numbers that were revised down $9 billion for the first seven months of the fiscal.
A panel, which includes chief economic advisor Kaushik Basu, director general of foreign trade Anup Pujari and chief statistician TCA Anant, felt there was need to clear the air and restore data credibility.
"We are looking at the possibility of coming out with a paper that would point out where all accounting goof-ups happened that led to the considerable over-estimation in export figures," a commerce department official told ET.
Some big data errors in recent times and high volatility in industrial growth have undermined the credibility of the data put out by the government, prompting some to take the official numbers with a pinch and others to disregard them completely and rely on alternate sources.
The white paper will be prepared by the directorate general of foreign trade.
The 46% growth in exports in April-October despite a near recession like situation in Europe and anemic growth in the United States has led to speculation that shipments were being massively over invoiced to bring back black money becuase of the rising global pressure on tax havens to come clean.
The steadily declining manufacturing growth that plunged to negative 6% in October did not help things. Last month, the commerce department added fuel to the fire when it disclosed a $9-billion over-reporting of export numbers in the April-October 2011 period.
There was suspicion that the exports number were revised down after the authorities discovered over-invoicing.
"It may be a good idea to be transparent and disclose where we erred rather than allow people to speculate and draw all sorts of conclusions about our integrity," the official explained.
Senior officials from the DGFT, the DGCI&S (which collates data for the commerce department), the Customs department and the statistics department and statisticians from the Indian Statistical Institute, met in Kolkata last week to scrutinise trade data and see exactly where things had gone wrong.
"We discovered that it was a genuine mistake of omissions and wrong counting, which we need to avoid in the future. The data that flowed to the DGCI&S was faulty and the department in turn reported those wrong numbers," the official said.
It is the Customs department that collects the data when shipments leave the country from ports and airports and the DGCI&S gets its data from customs officials.
"It was not a mistake of wrong entries, but of entire categories wrongly counted," the official explained.
A Delhi-based trade expert felt this may not be enough as the exercise will not match physical exports with flows and it was time for the Reserve Bank of India to step forward and provide data on exports receipts.
"The RBI code given for receiving payments more or less matches with the Importer Exporter Code given by the DGFT for carrying out exports. It is therefore not difficult to check at a later point of time if payments received by exporters were in tune with the shipments made," the expert said.
The RBI collects data on the basis of foreign exchange realization, but when it comes to presenting balance of payments, it mentions DGCI & S data.
While the two sets of data may not be strictly comparable on a month-to-month basis because payment flows for exports take time, it is possible to match payments to shipments on the basis of RBI code issued to exporters.
The RBI, too, had revised down its first quarter numbers by $7 billion on December 30, to bring it in line with DGCI&S numbers.
Source : economictimes.indiatimes.com