News that an impartial check confirmed fraud committed by local interviewers during a local survey for the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies KITLV (see Monday paper) is reason for concern. As a result, St. Maarten has been excluded from the study.
But more important, there are serious doubts about the work done by nine of the 11 persons involved and hired via the Department of Statistics STAT. This possibly also sheds new light on a discrepancy of 21,000 persons that occurred between the population figures of the 2011 census and those of the Civil Registry.
When the latter was first revealed in November 2013, STAT announced it would set out immediately to validate the numbers. It turned out there had been a similar gap of 12,000 after the one before last census in 2001.
In February 2014 a Household Listing Survey (HLS) was held as follow-up. It counted 37,224 residents of at least 12 months divided among some 14,000 households, just over 3,600 more inhabitants than the census figure of 33,609 three years earlier. STAT noted back then that tourism had led to a higher perceived total population on the island.
In January 2015 it was announced that the Dutch side had a total of 1,075 street addresses at the Civil Registry, STAT and the Ministry of Public Housing, Spatial Planning, Environment and Infrastructure. However, only 713 of these matched at all three entities.
In August of that same year STAT said it stood by the 2011 census figure, despite not having received any updates from the Civil Registry on the status or outcome of a comparative analysis and the cleaning up of its records. Based on the HLS it was concluded that the real resident population is considerably smaller than what is both felt by public opinion and officially registered.
Be that as it may, the KITLV experience indicates that not all interviewers used by STAT in the past might have been as reliable as originally assumed. The department should ensure this issue is properly dealt with to prevent a repeat, so that policy decisions are not based on faulty information in the future.
