Some Daur speakers used Manchu as their written language, and the influence of Manchu on Daur vocabulary and grammar led some to misclassify it as a Manchu-Tungus language.
Mr. Pinkney said he did not believe there existed a "concerted effort" from the top of the department to intentionally misclassify crimes, but he said that among lower-level supervisors there is "a pressure people feel" to not exceed last year's crime numbers.
Those charges underscore concerns of current and former officers who say that CompStat, which has been credited with bringing down major crimes, has created intense pressure to reduce crime each year and has led some supervisors to misclassify major crimes.
As to whether officers intentionally sought to misclassify or suppress crime reports, Mr. Kelley said, "the answer is, from time to time yes".
Likewise, there is no conclusive evidence that police officers routinely misclassify criminal incidents, or intentionally leave out pertinent information in their paperwork in order to characterize a felony as a misdemeanor.
One federal study concluded that employers illegally passed off 3.4 million regular workers as contractors, while the Labor Department estimates that up to 30 percent of companies misclassify employees.
"This denies many workers their basic rights and protections and means less revenues to the Treasury and a competitive advantage for employers who misclassify," said Jared Bernstein, who as executive director of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s Middle Class Task Force has helped orchestrate the administration's campaign against misclassification.
Another good area for savings is President Obama's proposal to bring the enforcement powers of the Labor Department and the Internal Revenue Service to bear on employers who evade taxes when they misclassify employees as independent contractors.
One of the reasons years of mismanagement at Mid Staffordshire went unnoticed is because it was possible to misclassify and misrepresent patient statistics.
There was a "creeping erosion of employment rights as companies misclassify their workers as self-employed", Powell said, adding that new technology was making it easier for companies to have more remote relationships with workers.
It makes it a felony to intentionally misclassify employees as independent contractors.
