A survey organization obtains the opinions of a random sample of Canadian adults as to how fair the Canadian tax system is on a five-point Likert scale, from “very fair” to “very unfair.” Five years later it surveys the same people and asks the same question in order to assess whether opinions have changed. The organization wishes to publish results claiming that opinions haven’t changed, and asks its statistician to analyze the results with the aim of producing such a report. The statistician uses Wilcoxon’s rank-sum test with a significance level of 95% and reports that opinions haven’t changed. According to the ASA Ethical Guidelines in Appendix C, what ethical issues does this raise:

a) For the survey organization?

b) For the statistician?

State your reasons clearly.