The Institute asks the Court to resolve the legal dispute related to the composition of its Board of Directors, assuring that there is “real and serious harm” caused to its supervisory functions
San Juan, PR, February 21, 2018 — The Puerto Rico Statistics Institute (Institute) filed a motion before the San Juan Court of First Instance reiterating its request for a Declaratory Judgment and Injuction requested following the legal controversy that arose last summer and which has not yet been resolved.
The request was submitted yesterday, February 20, 2018 and as a prelude to an argumentative hearing that has been scheduled for next Tuesday, February 27, with the objective of the parties' lawyers arguing their respective submitted motions and evaluating the possibility of resolving the case with the written documents already submitted.
Through the legal remedy presented, it is explained how the situation represents “real and serious harm” to the implementation of the Institute's Organic Law (Law 209-2003), in particular, the oversight of statistical functions and products as well as the award of disputes over those who have not complied with information requests issued by the Executive Director.
“Six months have passed since this lawsuit began, and at the Institute, as well as in some cases among the general public in Puerto Rico, in the United States and in the world, the effects have begun to be seen,” the Institute states in the appeal filed and then enumerated the damages suffered due to the lack of an operating Board of Directors.
Below, we highlight some of the damages outlined in the filed motion:
- Without the Board of Directors, the Institute has not been able to establish the standards, nomenclatures and classification of methods that the Government must follow to estimate the number of deaths caused by hurricanes Irma and María, and to then be able to monitor the quality and reliability of the statistical products generated by the Government on these deaths. In fact, the President of the American Statistical Association, the largest professional association of statisticians in the world, wrote a letter last month to the Governor to express her disappointment at the exclusion of expert experts from the Institute of Statistics in the accounting of deaths from hurricanes, in Executive Order 2018-01.
- Without the Board of Directors, the Institute has been unable to approve the hiring of an engineering expert to provide technical assistance to the Electric Power Authority so that it can for the first time provide the federal Government with statistics for each generation plant, as required by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, for every electric power supplier in the United States. Worse yet, without these statistics, it has not been possible to design an adequate plan for the recovery of the electrical system, after hurricanes Irma and María destroyed it.
- Without the Board of Directors, the Institute has been unable to respond to numerous requests related to information requests, which has virtually stopped the implementation of Law 187-2015, also known as the Law on the Interagency Validation Portal for the Granting of Incentives for Economic Development, an important anti-corruption and transparency tool, which facilitates the interagency oversight of tax incentives granted by public government agencies to private entities.
- Without the Board of Directors, the Institute has been unable to recruit the resources to carry out the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which we were about to begin this year, after it had not been conducted in almost 2 decades.
“The damage caused to Puerto Rico is real. In the absence of a Board of Directors, the Institute has been unable to take action to ensure that statistics on the impact of hurricanes are reliable and meet quality methodologies and criteria, at a time when the entire world has questioned these statistics from the Government of Puerto Rico,” the Institute points out in the legal resource. In addition, it requests the Court to issue the requested Declaratory Judgment and Injunction so that the Institute can be certain about who makes up, in law, its Board of Directors and can deal with pending and future matters as required by Law 209-2003.
On the other hand, the motion presented by the Institute states that the recent letter from the Fiscal Oversight Board about the Institute dismisses from its face the “removals” of the Institute's Board members under Act 3. He assures that, beyond the constitutional questions about the way in which the Governor has sought to remove 4 of the members of the Board of Directors, the only thing Law 3 could apply to Institute officials is if they represent a problem or a potential problem for the Governor of Puerto Rico to formulate and implement the fiscal plan required by PROMESA. “All the components created under the federal PROMESA law have highlighted the importance of keeping the Institute free from political intervention,” the Institute maintains in its motion, so there is no way to use the federal PROMESA Act to justify the removal of members of the Institute's Board of Directors.
On the other hand, if the Governor understood that some members of the Institute's Board of Directors were threatening the Government's compliance with the fiscal plan or with the provisions of PROMESA, he must formulate whatever charges he saw fit the members thus charged and carry out due process for their removal. However, to date, no charge has been made to charge members of the Institute's Board of Directors with actions that constitute just cause for their removal.
The Puerto Rico Statistics Institute is an autonomous governmental entity responsible for coordinating the Government's statistical production service to ensure that the data collection and statistics systems, on which public policies are based, are complete, reliable, and have quick and universal access. The IEPR has nearly 300 statistical products in its inventory, accessible through www.estadisticas.pr. In addition, it is a guardian and provides access to over 100 data sets or “data sets” through www.data.pr.gov and to over 40 tables and more than 6 thousand indicators through: www.indicadores.pr.
In addition, as the leading entity of Puerto Rico's SDC, the IEPR manages the SDC portal, which contains the main statistical reports and publications of the U.S. Census Bureau on Puerto Rico, specifically those that are most in demand, such as annual population estimates; the Puerto Rico Community Survey and official statistics on Puerto Rico's decennial population and housing censuses, among others. The Puerto Rico SDC portal can be accessed at: https://censo.estadisticas.pr/.
For more information you can visit our website: www.estadisticas.pr.gov. In addition, you can follow us on social networks through Facebook (estadisticas.pr), Twitter (@EstadisticasPR) and LinkedIn (Institute of Statistics of Puerto Rico) accounts.
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Press Contact: Sandra Morales Blanes/787-688-0401
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