In a Data-Driven World, It’s GI/GO

If you’re a big-time Tom Clancy fan, the name of sub-skipper Bart Mancuso is forever etched in your pop-culture memory
for a single line of dialogue. Responding to a sailor’s warning that a torpedo was closing in, he shot back:  “No s—, Buckwheat, now get the hell out of here!”

A rather choice Capt. Mancuso’s moment came over the summer when the Department of Labor announced a teensy-weensy revision in the number of jobs created in the U.S. over a one-year period ending in March. Seems the nose-counters were overly optimistic by juuuuust … 818,000 jobs. Poof! Those jobs no longer existed. Or, rather, never did exist.

Anyone paying attention to real-world tales of hiring challenges could have told Buckwheat as much. Recognizing that anecdotes do not constitute data, I absorbed that report and immediately thought of a young man from my parish who was on the front lines of current employment trends. Razor-sharp kid, eminently coachable, earned a degree in economics in three years, Eagle Scout—really, the kind of young worker companies are supposedly starving for in the quest for talent.

Three months later, he’s still throwing boxes for UPS. Or maybe it’s FedEx. Not that there’s anything wrong with logistics jobs, but this young fellow is qualified to be doing a heck of a lot more and making a much better living doing it. And he’s not the only one from that high school class rowing that boat. There are others.

The point is: the feds’ data stunk to high heaven. Is any business leader out there making strategic decisions based on monthly Labor Department employment data? I doubt it. But lots and lots of other data are tracked at every level of government can be—well, challenging. And never have I seen someone booted from a position of authority for screwups like underestimating job growth by more than the combined populations of Johnson and Wyandotte counties.

So … employment data. Commerce Department economic performance reports. SEC data sets on wealth-management firms’ assets. Credit union and bank assets through the NCUA and FDIC.  K-12 testing outcomes. College graduation rates. We track all of those here for various lists we publish annually, and it’s a regular issue trying to reconcile numbers reported for thousands of organizations that conflict with the data points released by the same agencies the previous year. The baselines often change. Why is that?

Rarely is there an explanation. Rarer still, I expect, are apologies to organizations adversely affected by bad data.

This all comes to mind as Ingram’s prepares its annual Book of Leads & Lists, a key component of the 2025 Power Book. About one-fourth of the lists we produce rely on data drawn from public-sector agencies. And the feds do not stand in the dock alone: Perhaps even more guilt is shared by local and state budgeting agencies. They are the true masters of opacity precisely where residents and taxpayers should find engagement and access the easiest: Locally.

Consider: The current fiscal year budget for Kansas City, Mo., runs a tidy 700 pages. I dare you to find a specific data point you’re looking for in that mass of budget-speak covering $2.3 billion in outlays. Overland Park’s? Half the page count, 350, for $430.6 million in spending. The Lee’s Summit School District? A pillar of brevity by comparison, at a meager 54 pages.

Don’t even start on Missouri and Kansas at the state level. In almost every case, budget documents fail to clearly break out information that commoners—you know, the ones who foot the tax bill—can readily access. The stuff people want to know isn’t hard: How much are you spending? And don’t hide it behind reams of different fund classifications operating/capital/debt budgets or complex jargon. Just bottom line, total, and how does that compare to last year?

They want to know how many people are employed and what the jurisdiction is spending on salaries and benefits, including retirement-fund payments. Is that staffing level the same as a year ago? Higher? Why? Lower? Again, why?

They want to know specifics about administrative compensation. Do this year’s financial metrics square with proposed raises at the top? They want to know who, with some degree of specifics, is helping them foot the bill—and who’s getting a free ride.

The list of our most relevant questions isn’t a long one. Finding answers to them, though, shouldn’t require the skills of a forensic accountant. 

As election season enters its final days, would it be asking too much of November’s winners to provide a bit of that clarity going forward?