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Transcript of a Press Briefing by Gerry Rice, Director, External Relations Department, International Monetary Fund
Washington, D.C.
Thursday, October 4, 2012

MR. RICE:  Let me go to colleagues online and then I will come back into the room. There is a question on Argentina which I would like to take. "Argentina's President Cristina Kirchner rejected the IMF's criticism of her government's economic data and dismissed an IMF threat of unspecified sanctions if changes are not made. What is the IMF's answer to that?" What I'd like to say in response to that is that of course the quality, the reliability, the integrity of data is absolutely essential for the IMF to do its work. That is true in the case of all our member countries big and small regardless. It's something that is essential to us and that's why this issue is so important. With regard to the Argentina CPI and GDP data, as you know we continue to follow our established procedures under our framework and it's up to the IMF board to determine what the pace of the application of this procedure would be. So the board will meet again in December as we have announced and they will deliberate again on this issue at that time. Perhaps just add though that as the Managing Director mentioned recently, we stand ready to cooperate with the Argentine authorities with regard to the quality of their CPI and GDP data and working with them to that end.