Questioning the reliability of ADP job numbers

The government will tell us Friday how many jobs were created in March, but a payroll processing company called ADP puts out its own jobs numbers every month, a few days ahead of the government. 

Lately, those numbers have been  off, and economists have been upset. But ADP defends its numbers. “Every month we’re a little above or below, but on average we’re almost right on,” says  Sophia Koropeckyj, an economist at Moody’s, which works with ADP to come up with the jobs numbers.

Koropeckyj acknowledges that they’ve tinkered with the formula used to come up with the ADP jobs number, adding information from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. But she says, there are millions of jobs in this country, and their figure may be off by tens of thousands.

Here are their numbers for this month, via Jeoff Hall at Thomson Reuters: