ATHENS, Sept. 22 - Greece confessed Wednesday to having repeatedly misrepresented significant economic data before it joined the European currency union, prompting suggestions that it might not have qualified had the true figures been known.

Finance Minister George Alogoskoufis made the admission a day after the European Union's Executive Commission announced that Greece's debt and deficit figures had been revised after the discovery of errors in data sent to the union's headquarters in Brussels in recent years.

Mr. Alogoskoufis said the creative accounting, as he put it, was the work of his socialist predecessors, whom conservatives ousted last March.

"The problem would not be so serious if it had happened only one year," he said in a parliamentary debate. But "the fiscal derailment is due to actions and omissions by the previous government, and we cannot hide behind our little finger anymore."