In some contexts, states issue reports relating to casualties covering a particular period of time or category of victim. During a conflict, states sometimes issue monthly or annual figures, integrative and incident-based reports.
Casualty recorders often saw these reports as problematic. Where totals were given without an incident-by-incident breakdown, there was no meaningful way to check them against other more detailed data. Even when detailed data was released, it was often judged incomplete or issued in the service of some political end, and thereby suspect. States have privileged access to a lot of data, and the resources to investigate comprehensively. Incident-based casualty reporting by central government produced records that were seen as useful, and even close in their results to recorders’ own work in some contexts. Other casualty recorders were suspicious of politicisation in government recording. Integrative reports were hard to use for casualty recorders, whoever produces them.
THE RANGE OF SOURCES IN CASUALTY RECORDING, pp. 10-11
