'Understating' of suspected fraud sees CSO delay publishing crime stats
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The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has postponed publishing crime statistics for the third quarter of this year due to concerns about a backlog in the recording of potential fraud-related crime, it said on Thursday.
The backlog relates only to potential crimes reported by financial institutions under Section 19 of the Criminal Justice Act 2011 on An Garda Siochána’s Pulse system.
This means previous publications by the CSO using Pulse data only under the categories of ‘fraud, deception and related offences’ have been understated, they said.
The issue was picked up on by An Garda Síochána and reported to the CSO.
There is currently “no firm estimate” of how many crimes falling under these headings are involved.
The data had been due to be published on Thursday, but the CSO has now said this will not happen until early next year.
“The recording of crime incidents under all other offence categories is not considered to be affected by this issue,” the CSO said.
The under-recording means statistics previously published by the CSO using Pulse data under the headings of fraud, deception and related offences “has been understated”, they added.
Data on these offences is now “considered incomplete” they said, and they advised anyone using those statistics to “exercise caution”.
Data from Pulse is used to give recorded crime data to the CSO by the gardaí and this forms the basis for official crime statistics.
The CSO will continue discussing this with the gardaí to assess the scale of this issue and its likely impact on crime statistics for those categories.
“At present, the CSO has no firm estimate of the number of suspected crime incidents involved, or the likely impact on the time series under the category of Fraud, Deception & Related offences,” they said in a statement.
The CSO expects to receive more information from the gardaí on this. They predicted they will publish the delayed data “in early 2025” instead.
Gardaí will continue processing the Section 19 returns from banks and other financial institutions.
A garda spokeswoman on Thursday reiterated that the issue was notified to the CSO by An Garda Síochána. This was done as “as part of established engagement process around data quality and assurance”, she said.
The gardaí have already published more information on this issue in their data quarterly report which is available to read through the garda website.
In October 2023, the CSO had said it concluded a review of Pulse data and deemed the information reliable, removing a previous 'under reservation' warning.
Since March 2018, the CSO had applied the 'under reservation' warning to recorded crime statistics to alert users that the CSO had concerns about the quality of the data source.
The reservation has been lifted for recorded crime data disseminated by the CSO from Quarter 1, 2023. The CSO also noted that the improved data is beneficial for operational policing purposes.
Garda Commissioner Drew Harris described that move at the time as “a milestone decision”.
“Modern, professional police services increasingly use data such as crime statistics to prevent and tackle crime," he also said.