The number of people killed or left homeless in last year’s earthquake in Haiti was much lower than claimed by the country’s leaders, according to a draft report commissioned by the US government.

According to BBC, the as-yet unpublished report places the death toll at between 46,000 and 85,000 – while the government in Port-Au-Prince claimed about 316,000 died.

The report is based on a survey commissioned by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and calculated its figures from door-to-door surveys conducted in January 2011.

The report also indicates that quake survivors still residing in tent cities may not have lost their homes in the catastrophe.

However, a spokeswoman for the US State Department, Preeti Shah, told Associated Press that the report will not be released until it fixes some inconsistencies in the data.

In any case, the revised casualty numbers could seriously reduce the amount of money in aid that the US would send to Haiti to0 rebuild that country.

The report also said that about 895,000 people originally moved into temporary settlement camps located in the vicinity of Port-au-Prince, and that no more than 375,000 individuals are currently living in the tent communities.

This data starkly disagrees with figures from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which claimed that as many as 1.5-million Haitians moved into those camps immediately after the quake and that almost 700.000 remain in the camps.

USAID Settlement Earthquake Earthquake