PANews reported on August 28 that according to Jinshi, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Labor said that the U.S. government failed to share key non-farm (revised) data in a timely manner last week due to technical failures, and he admitted that staff provided the data to callers before the release. In the future, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is supervised by the Department of Labor, will release data through multiple platforms, including social media, to ensure that the data is available when it is released. A spokesman for the Department of Labor said in an email that the Department of Labor has implemented a new policy that stipulates that employees who handle data inquiries can only share data with customers after senior staff of the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirm that the data is widely available to the public. The spokesman said that on August 21, local time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the preliminary benchmark revision of non-farm data for more than half an hour late, forcing staff to upload the data manually. According to the spokesman, although the numbers were visible to BLS employees on the website internally at 10:10 a.m. Washington time, they were not available to external network users until about 10:32 a.m. The spokesman also said that the problem was compounded by a lack of communication within the bureau on how to respond to public inquiries. Because the 10 p.m. moratorium had passed, some BLS employees gave the information to people who requested it.
