Exactly. The stats can be juked in any way they want, they're meaningless.

It reminds me of how, in Mao's China and in the USSR, agriculture officials would lie about crop yields out of fear of their superiors. The senior officials demanded that their ideas of Lysenkoism and farm collectivization work. They were ideologically committed to them working and would not accept failure. So the people under them just lied. And the people under them lied. All the way down to the farmers. The whole system ran on fear and a determination to not be proven wrong, and when people were starving by the millions, they just didn't report on that.