Current Employment Statistics (BLS)

I received a post from an investment advisor Mr. Steve Reitmeister, making very discouraging remarks about the differences between BLS statistics as compared to the ADP statistics. These remarks to me indicate a rather limited knowledge about the various systems and how they relate to a business.

I own and operate a business and we just happened to be one have the 144,000 business and government agencies that the BLS samples, additionally we do use ADP for our payroll.

First and most important, accuracy and timeliness of our data to ADP is critical and essential, without it my employees do not get paid in a timely and accurate manner. Second and not so important, my data to the CLS CES survey is not critical or essential to the operations of my business, it is done as a civic duty.

That all said, let me reflect a little about my business. First I still employ the same number of individuals as I did last year, but and it is an important but, I have slashed my G&A, how I did this was by either moved individual from my back office to production positions, or a let back office individual go and hiring individuals to fill offsetting positions in production.

The workload on the back staff nearly doubled, which resulted in a reassessment of priorities for those who were left, and a side note compensation for the “survivors” or “the walking dead” as they call themselves was increased reflect the addition duties thrust upon them. Priorities were adjusted, what we have to have changed, what would be nice to have changed, and what we could live without changed. Additionally we have started to use temporary contractors on a very limited basis to perform certain task are one-shot events (yearly inventory audits).

As a consequence we really only make an attempt to make sure that our response to the BLS survey is accurate about once a quarter, the rest of the time we just change the date and send in the previous months report. On the other hand we make every effort to provide timely and accurate input for our payroll, again as before our business depends on it.

So for Mr. Steve Reitmeister to get all balled up on the numbers the BLS supplies is rather immature and to some extent indicates his fundamental lack of understanding on how the data associated with this report is generated and gathered. Given that there are no immediate or even long-term repercussion associated with lack of accuracy of the data or for that matter timeliness that my business provides voluntarily to the BLS the report should really be taken with several grains of salt.

Additionally your tax dollars were not used in the generation of the data provided to the BLS for this report. It is a classic case of GIGO.