The city auditor is examining how Dallas police collect crime statistics, and the findings are expected soon.

It's unclear what the report will mean, but city leaders say they're ready to get their hands on it.

"I'm just awaiting it eagerly," said council member Ann Margolin, vice chairwoman of the council's budget, finance and audit committee. "I am just very curious to see what he's going to find."

Word of the report follows findings by The Dallas Morning News last year that Dallas police, by not conforming to federal guidelines, let hundreds of offenses slip from the city's reported crime tally.

The audit was initiated before the newspaper's investigations; it was included in the city auditor's plan for fiscal year 2009, records show. The report is one of several that City Auditor Craig Kinton told members of the budget, finance and audit committee on Monday that they should receive in coming weeks.

Margolin, who is also on the council's public safety committee, said The News' investigations have concerned her.

"I just want to be clear that when we see statistics, that we can count on them," she said. "And even more so, that we can compare them year to year and month to month and that that all has meaning."

Kinton would not comment on the report, which focuses on 2008 numbers, because it is unfinished.

Police Chief David Kunkle, who is to retire by April, also declined to comment Monday, saying he had not seen a draft of the report. The chief has previously defended his department's crime statistics computations.

The city auditor reports directly to the City Council and is primarily responsible for appraising the efficiency and effectiveness of city departments and services. The auditor also investigates reports of fraud and accounting irregularities.

The News found that police misclassify many home and business burglaries. Also, as a result of reporting changes made in 2007 and 2008, police have misclassified many aggravated assaults and discarded seemingly legitimate car burglary reports as untrustworthy. Experts say the practices deviate from federal guidelines and artificially lower the city's crime rate.

Police are supposed to classify crime and collect statistics in accordance with the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which is run by the FBI. Law enforcement agencies are not required to participate, but almost all do.

And while the FBI strongly discourages comparing one place with another based on the raw statistics, many people do.

Last year, Dallas shed its distinction as having the highest crime rate of U.S. cities with more than 1 million people. San Antonio gained that distinction, and Dallas fell to No. 2. The Dallas City Council wants to be out of the top eight by 2013.

Dallas is among many cities where significant reporting problems have occurred. In a new survey by two criminologists studying the New York Police Department, more than 100 retired captains and other brass said the push to reduce crime numbers had led some supervisors to manipulate that city's crime books, The New York Times reported Saturday.

In recent years, Kunkle and other Dallas police officials have repeatedly said they've made reporting changes to better conform to federal guidelines. But after The News' investigations, the chief said that the guidelines are unclear and that, because other cities don't always follow them closely, it would be unfair to Dallas to take them too literally.

"I believe those are guidelines, not rules," Kunkle said recently. "They're not consistently followed across the country, and on their face many of them are contradictory with each other or with the basic definitions."

Police officials are scheduled to brief the council's public safety committee on crime reporting next week. The committee's chairman, Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway, has called for an "extensive review." He said Monday that he was looking forward to hearing from the police and the auditor.

"Then we'll have a chance to weigh the two and make an assessment of where we need to go," he said.