Abstract. Reviewing Iran's foreign trade statistics in the last years and comparing them to the existing international standards demonstrates some problems in producing the data, such as, incomplete country reports on foreign trade in United Nation Statistical Division's data base, repeated requests of UNSD for timely provision of statistics on foreign trade, incoherence of the statistics with international standards, lags in time series, statistics not provided in various types of standard classifications, etc., which results in damages to the statistical credit of the country on one side, and improper evaluation of the country’s international economic status, on the other side.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the causes of inconsistency in foreign trade statistics of Iran in order to find out the strengths and weaknesses of the data in comparison to the international standards of data collection. To this end, the standards and recommendations of relevant international organizations are introduced and studied, and Iran's status is analyzed with respect to these standards. Finally, some recommendations are proposed to deal with the existing problems.