Governor Sanford Issues Statement on Unemployment Rate

Columbia, S.C. - March 28, 2008 - Governor Mark Sanford today issued the following statement on South Carolina's unemployment rate dropping from 6.1 percent to 5.5 percent:

"While we'd normally be very pleased about a drop this significant in the unemployment rate, we're beginning to develop some real concerns about the reliability and accuracy of these numbers," Gov. Sanford said. "Just a few months ago, the Employment Security Commission announced one of the biggest increases in unemployment rate in state history. Then, come to find out, it didn't happen at all - the ESC quietly revised their numbers about a month later, and realized they had undercounted 20,000 jobs last year. Not only that, their revisions indicated that they had undercounted South Carolina jobs every single month in 2007. We're quickly getting to the point where one could lose confidence in the data that agency is producing. That's a real problem, because as policy makers we depend on having reliable data as we make decisions with respect to the South Carolina economy. It's worth taking another look to see how mistakes of this magnitude keep being made."