These flaws posed a bigger threat to the Paris climate agreement than US President Donald Trump's intention to withdraw, researchers told BBC Radio 4's Counting Carbon program.
Bottom-up records
Among the key provisions of the Paris climate deal, signed by 195 countries in December 2015, is the requirement that every country, rich or poor, has to submit an inventory of its greenhouse-gas emissions every two years.
Under UN rules, most countries produce "bottom-up" records, based on how many car journeys are made or how much energy is used for heating homes and offices.
But air-sampling programs that record actual levels of gases, such as those run by the UK and Switzerland, sometimes reveal errors and omissions.
In 2011, Swiss scientists first published their data on levels of a gas called HFC-23 coming from a location in northern Italy.
Between 2008 and 2010, they had recorded samples of the chemical, produced in the refrigeration and air conditioning industries, which is 14,800 times more warming to the atmosphere than CO2.
Now the scientists, at the Jungfraujoch Swiss air monitoring station, have told the BBC the gas is still going into the atmosphere.
"Our estimate for this location in Italy is about 60-80 tonnes of this substance being emitted every year. Then we can compare this with the Italian emission inventory, and that is quite interesting because the official inventory says below 10 tonnes or in the region of two to three tonnes," said Dr Stefan Reimann, from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology.
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Another rare warming gas, carbon tetrachloride, once popular as a refrigerant and a solvent but very damaging to the ozone layer, has been banned in Europe since 2002.
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But Dr Reimann told Counting Carbon: "We still see 10,000-20,000 tonnes coming out of China every year."
"That is something that shouldn't be there.
"There is actually no Chinese inventory for these gases, as they are banned and industry shouldn't be releasing them anymore."
China's approach to reporting its overall output of warming gases to the UN is also subject to constant and significant revisions.
Its last submission ran to about 30 pages - the UK's, by contrast, runs to several hundred.
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"What we're worried about is what the planet experiences, never mind what the statistics are," said Prof Euan Nisbet, from Royal Holloway, University of London.
"In the air we see methane going up. The warming impact from that methane is enough to derail Paris."
The rules covering how countries report their emissions are currently being negotiated.
But Prof Glen Peters, from the Center for International Climate Research, in Oslo, said: "The core part of Paris [is] the global stock-takes which are going to happen every five years, and after the stock-takes countries are meant to raise their ambition, but if you can't track progress sufficiently, which is the whole point of these stock-takes, you basically can't do anything.
"So, without good data as a basis, Paris essentially collapses. It just becomes a talkfest without much progress."
Read more at 'Dodgy' Greenhouse Gas Data Threatens Paris Accord
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