Feds: Colorado unemployment data too unreliable to publish

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will stop publishing reports using Colorado employment data because the federal agency says the state’s information is not reliably accurate. 

For its part, the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment claims that the data-accuracy problems stem from an unemployment insurance technology-modernization effort in late 2023 that resulted in drastically reduced rates of compliance for employer self-reporting of employment figures. 

The state-level data issues in Colorado have the potential to cause downstream accuracy impacts on the BLS’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Current Employment Statistics and Local Area Unemployment Statistics programs, the federal government said this month. 

Colorado employment data will be published for December, but BLS said it “will suspend publication of data for Colorado and its local areas beginning with January 2025 estimates.” 

The December 2024 Colorado Employment Situation report is expected to be released on Jan. 27, but future releases of these monthly reports “may be impacted,” a CDLE spokesperson told BizWest in an email. BizWest regularly reports on the Colorado Employment Situation data releases, which are often subject to significant revisions after publication by CDLE.

Exactly when the normal publication of Colorado unemployment data will resume has yet to be determined.

“BLS is working closely with Colorado to resolve the data quality issues with the state’s UI data that feed into BLS employment, unemployment, and wage measures,” the federal agency said. “Pending resolution of these data quality concerns, BLS will resume publication of employment, unemployment and wage data for Colorado as soon as practicable.”

After plummeting last year on the heels of what CDLE calls “an IT modernization” of its unemployment insurance filing system, the “employer reporting rate has jumped back to 80.4% in Q2 2024, with work ongoing to continue to improve data quality and increase reporting rates,” the department spokesperson said. 

While a marked improvement over the third quarter of 2023, when an abysmal 28.3% of businesses reported employment data to the state, the 80.4% reporting rate in the second quarter of this year was still one of the nation’s lowest. 

“We regret that the BLS has chosen not to use our data in the interim, but we look forward to continued collaboration with BLS to ensure the most accurate Colorado employment data is available and to fully regain the trust of the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics,” the CDLE representative said. 

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