Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) is bickering with the Treasury Department over delayed data.

CNN: No Easy Answer To Teen Smoking

Full FDA approval had been delayed pending regulatory review of additional clinical data.

FORBES: AstraZeneca's Big Green Light

Complicating matters for Merck and Schering is the fact that the companies delayed the release of the ENHANCE trial data by more than a year, releasing it only after inquiries from Forbes.

FORBES: Magazine Article

How about the rate of GDP growth, the number of new housing starts, median household income, the producer price index and countless other economic indicators if they were reported without distortions caused by unstable concurrent seasonal adjustments, subjective hedonic deflators, chain-weighted substitutions, skewed sampling, delayed reporting, historical estimates in place of data gone unreported by failed companies, and other common bias factors?

FORBES: Distorted Government Statistics Endanger Our Economic Health

The drug had been delayed as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration asked for more data.

FORBES: With Drug Approval, Lilly Sighs Relief

As I was first to report in 2007, Merck and then-partner Schering-Plough delayed analyzing the study, called ENHANCE, for months over what they believed were data quality problems.

FORBES: Merck To Pay $688 Million To Shareholders For Delaying Vytorin Results

Schering-Plough and Merck say the ENHANCE trial is delayed because some of the images produced are "biologically implausible, " requiring laborious rechecking of data.

FORBES: Magazine Article