Honda admitted on Monday that a third-party audit showed the company failed to make required reports of more than 1,700 written claims or notices of injuries or deaths in its cars over the last 11 years.

The automaker did not file more than half of the "Early Warning Reports" that should have been submitted to federal regulators like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that was enacted in 2003. The government uses these reports to alert them to any defect trends that may be to blame for widespread accidents.

Honda did not file 1,729 of these EWRs, and the car company said it found out it was not properly reporting from the results of this audit, according to USA Today. Data and coding errors were to blame for the narrow interpretation of incidents that needed to be reported.

The shortcomings in reporting are a separate situation from the current case of the defective Atalanta air bag inflators that have been in the headlines as of late for causing at least three deaths, according to Honda.

It said the audit showed only eight cases of the unreported batch included Takata air bag failures, which totaled one death and seven injuries, but NHTSA was already informed of these accidents by other means. Ten automakers, including Honda, are subject to U.S. recalls related to these inflators, but Honda is by far the company with the largest number of affected vehicles.

Executives from Honda testified in front of a Senate committee last week. So in addition to the airbag-related recalls, this newfound error in reporting will do nothing to help the situation.

"It strains credulity that a sophisticated company like Honda could make so many data-entry errors, coding errors and narrow interpretations of what's a written claim," Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, said in a statement.

Over that period, Honda did make 1,144 reports, but maintains they didn't know something was off in its reporting methods until 2011, when an employee noticed a misalignment that was believed to affect the number of cases involved.