Finance Ministry and National Statistics Institute don't see eye to eye on number of public sector employees

The number of employees in the public sector went down by more than 36,000 from late 2008 through February 2010, said Gheorghe Gherghina, state secretary with the Finance Ministry on Friday during an "extraordinary" press conference held after Ziarul Financiar wrote that the number of public administration employees had gone up in the past year based on National Statistics Institute data.
The chairman of the National Statistics Institute Vergil Voineagu and Gheorghe Gherghina tried to explain how both sets of data could be correct at the same time, blaming everything on different methodologies.
INS published a survey on the salary incomes in October 2009 on Thursday, which showed the number of salaried employees in public administration had gone up by 26,000 people. The number of employees in public administration stood at 360,000 in October 2009 compared with 334,000 in October 2008.
According to Gherghina's data, 1,362,463 public positions were filled in February 2010, compared with 1,398,867 in December 2008.
"The INS and Finance Ministry data are not comparable. The data from the Finance Ministry are equally accurate, but we are talking a different scope here. It is about good quality data," said Vergil Voineagu.