I thought this was an interesting overview of how, even with government statistical information at our hands, the information therein can be skewed because of flaws in the source data. How can we expect out government officials to make good decisions if we can't even collect valid data to guide their decisions?
It's an interesting problem. I'm currently working in a research lab where we develop diagnostic tools for aerospace systems. I can attest first hand to just how hard it is to build robust data collection systems. Most public agencies should probably have at least one trained data scientist on staff these days, but good data scientists don't come cheap.
Given the adnormal number of hard drive crashed when congress requested data from the IRS, maybe the solution would be to request data from all government departments. This will result in virtually a complete loss of data therefore everyone could start from scratch and build a proper data system from scratch.