Data errors: CPA too resorts to double counting

It has now emerged that Chittagong Port Authority (CPA) has been calculating the number of outbound containers twice. Interestingly enough, the CPA has gone on record to state that this is, apparently, the international practice. While checking the number of containers twice is probably to ascertain that the initial count was correct, not so much to double the number of containers being shipped abroad. It would appear that in our country, every agency, department and ministry involved with collection of data on exports is at liberty to choose its own data-collection process. Now that the cat is out of the bag, there appears to be a blame game afoot to pass the responsibility on to some other party. For years, business leaders, trade experts and economists have been pointing out that figures have been inflated and to what end? It is very easy to see the discrepancies because import data of readymade apparels are readily available both from the United States and the European Union (EU), both of which regularly publish these figures online.

While the blame game goes on, one wonders what happened to the 'digitisation' of infrastructures such as seaports. Any expert on the issue will agree unanimously that digitising would take care of data-collection and do away with much of the data mismatch we are witnessing of late. Since the systems were not developed (reasons which ought to be investigated thoroughly), policymakers find themselves in this mess, inundated with questions both domestically and internationally. While domestic parties may be ignored at will, the same cannot be said of foreign (would be) investors, and therein lies the problem.

If one is to go by what Bangladesh Bank (the central bank) has come up in its revised July-April period of the 2023-24 fiscal year, export receipts have been lowered by $13.8 billion vis-à-vis Export Promotion Bureau (EPB) data. As greater scrutiny is now being done on previous years, a further $12 billion mismatch was found with the fiscal year preceding this. It is interesting to observe that these revised figures come from further scrutiny of Kamalapur Inland Container Depot (ICD) and Pangaon Inland Container Terminal (ICT) and their container handling is being counted on top of CPA. What is the point of counting and double-counting containers and showing such inflated data, if it is not an attempt to prove that the economy is doing fabulously well? These fantastic figures may have fooled local decision makers but they made no impression on foreign observers.

Facing so much heat, EPB, meanwhile, has delayed the publication of the June export data. The reasons require little explanation, since it is obvious that the bureau must revisit previously published data and redo them to reflect reality on the ground. Actually, the fault lies with the National Board of Revenue (NBR) which has compiled export data multiple times. Needless to say, there are repercussions for such unprofessionalism, because foreign investors look to EPB data as one of the major sources of information and now that all sorts of 'data mismatch' are appearing, the matter needs to be resolved as soon as possible. That is to ensure that such bungling does not happen in the future. Authorities need to look at data over many preceding fiscal years to ascertain whether this error in data compilation was a systemic problem.