“IBGE is falsifying employment and inflation data.”
The error is not in the spreadsheet. And the IBGE's problem is real too.
One story circulating online says IBGE — Brazil's national statistics office — is falsifying the numbers. Another, from the campaign, says questioning IBGE is an attack on democracy. Both are simplifications, and both get in the way of understanding what is actually happening.
"The numbers are made up."
There is no evidence whatsoever of manipulation of the IPCA (consumer price index) or the PNAD (labour force survey). Both are surveys with public methodology, open microdata, an auditable sample and career civil servants running them. Any researcher can recompute the indices from the microdata — and universities, banks and independent institutes do exactly that routinely, arriving at the same results.
The 2025 re-weighting of the PNAD, done to incorporate the 2022 Census, is a standard technical procedure, announced in advance and applied retroactively across the whole series — including the previous government's years. It creates no artificial improvement: it recalibrates past and present with the same ruler.
And the IPCA weights still come from the previous household budget survey: the update only takes effect from 2027. In other words, the index used in this comparison was not altered by this government.
The institutional safeguards have eroded — and that is documented.
On 19 January 2026, Rebeca Palis, the coordinator responsible for calculating GDP, was dismissed. At least three members of her team gave up their positions in solidarity.
In February and March 2026, the public prosecutor attached to the federal audit court requested the removal of IBGE's president, Márcio Pochmann, citing the risk of political use of GDP data in an election year and concern over changes to collection and processing methodologies.
None of this shows that any figure was falsified. It shows that the safeguards which make falsification difficult have become more fragile — and that is a legitimate reason for vigilance, not for panic.
Accusing IBGE of fraud is unfair to the people who produce the data and distracts from the real problem. The data is reliable; it is the yardstick applied to it in the campaign material that is chosen. At the same time, the institute's governance crisis is real and deserves scrutiny — not least because the best defence of the numbers is the independence of those who calculate them.
Sources: IBGE — technical note on the 2025 PNAD re-weighting and post-2022-Census population projections; IBGE/POF on the update of IPCA weights; Correio Braziliense and Gazeta do Povo (March 2026) on the prosecutor's filing at the audit court and the dismissals in the national accounts directorate.
Other fact-checks
This calculation needs to travel.
A bent yardstick travels fast because it is simple. Context travels slowly because it needs explaining. If this check helped you understand the number, it will help someone else too.
The text comes pre-filled with the key figure. Write your own if you prefer — the link is the same.