The Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday accidentally posted sensitive economic data on its Web site, causing confusion in the financial markets and producing a cautionary tale for federal managers about the power of the Internet.
A portion of the monthly employment situation report was "inadvertently" posted to the BLS Web site, a spokeswoman said. Rumors of the early release of the nationwide employment data, which were set to be released Friday, pushed Treasury bond prices up briefly Thursday. The data showed 80,000 fewer U.S. jobs than economists had predicted. Financial analysts hoped the slowdown in U.S. economic growth would push the Federal Reserve to reduce short-term interest rates.
A report on the employment data is usually released on the first Friday each month in a ritual of secrecy meant to prevent any financial group from gaining an advantage over others. Reporters are usually locked in a room at 8 a.m. and given the report. They remain confined in the room until 8:30, when the data is officially released.
But this month financial analysts stumbled across supplementary tables of the employment report early Thursday morning on the BLS Web site. An analyst alerted BLS to the mistake. The agency decided to release the full report at 1:30 p.m. Thursday to allay confusion and rumors circulating among financial analysts.
The tables were supposed to be loaded to to a secure server accessible only to BLS employees, but were accidentally posted to the public Web site on Wednesday afternoon, BLS Commissioner Katherine Abraham said Friday. BLS took the tables off the Web site at 9:00 a.m. Thursday, when the financial analyst alerted BLS. But the agency reposted the data at 9:30 after receiving additional calls requesting confirmation of the data's accuracy. Press organizations began reporting on the data as early as 10:35 a.m. Thursday.
"A staff member thought that clearance had been given to place the files containing these data onto a BLS internal server," Abraham explained in a statement. "This task was executed without recognition that the action would prompt the system to load the files immediately onto the public access Web site. The absence of a built-in requirement for higher-level review before these data were placed in the public domain, as is required in our centralized procedures, represented a serious failure of management control."
Abraham said BLS had suspended loading supplementary materials onto the Web site and will conduct a review of procedures in conjunction with the Labor Department's inspector general.
In a statement, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman said she asked Abraham to ensure the error does not again occur.
"We recognize that in the age of instant communications, we at the department must assure that information can be accessed by all in a fair and equitable way. That is why we do have strict rules on the release of this data and have begun a review to determine what went wrong," Herman said.
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