The Federal Court of Auditors apparently criticized the unemployment statistics in an internal audit report. According to the nationwide, the files of about 290,000 long-term unemployed are wrong or incomplete, criticize the auditors from Bonn, according to a message of "Bild am Sonntag".
The newspaper assumes that this will also make the official unemployment statistics around 115,000 too low. The number of unemployed was last at 2.37 million people. For the investigation, the Court of Auditors randomly examined data from the year 2017.
Reason for the wrong numbers are in the opinion of the Court of Auditors sloppiness: So many files were wrong or incomplete because the job centers did not sufficiently care about Hartz IV recipients. "Care through the job centers was often interrupted for several months," says the report. In addition, there are problems with non-binding regulations and a lack of specialist supervision.
The Federal Employment Agency told Bild am Sonntag that in future all job centers should be obliged to use IT systems in order to prevent such problems. A corresponding directive is in work. In addition, the employees in job centers and employment agencies are better trained to collect statistical data.