International Roundtable on Business Survey Frames

International Roundtable on Business Survey Frames

The Netherlands
Jean Ritzen
Statistics Netherlands
29 September 2006

Country progress report 2006

1. Organisation

The Business Register (BR) is part of the Business Economic Statistics Division at Statistics Netherlands (SN). Broad, coherent programs are being set up in relation with a main ICT-oriented master plan for the intermediate future. The master planforesees the development of general IT tools for the various stages in the statistical process (data collection, editing, analysis and publication).

Examples of the programs are the redesigning of the chain of statistics describing the production processes (short-term statistics (STS)and yearly statistics (SBS) resulting in the national accounts) and the implementation of an agreed strategy on data collection, among which the use of administrative registers and electronic data reporting. Many of these programs have a strong relationship with the BR.

The business register is maintained centrally by the BR department. The goal is to have a high quality list of statistical units and their statistical characteristics which SN uses as the population for its business statistics. Maintenance and updating are done efficiently by combining information from different administrative sources. If the frame signals problems, manual intervention follows. Staff of SN deals with big enterprises and large enterprise groups in individual and regular profiling. The business register system also has a system with deviating information for data collection, and a system for providing coordinated population figures estimated at specified levels of the SIC classification. The latter two systems are maintained outside the BR department, although there are very close links.

2. Issues and problems resolved during the past year

a. The implementation of the new version of the business register

The new version of the BR is the result of a redesigning process that took about two years. It became operational in its core functionality on1 July 2006. There will be a period of double processing with the previous system for several months to avoid a period of too much instability. This period is also used for the analysis of discontinuities in figures of the derived populations, and of deviations in resulting individual statistical units.

The following features in the new BR system differ greatly from the previous one:

- The newly developed single Dutch administrative business register (BBR) is introduced as the main administrative source for the BR. This source integrates more sources used originally and has a wider coverage of objects in the economy.

- A new procedure is introduced for the derivation of the statistical units from the source units. The resulting statistical units are informed by letter on the contents of the unit in terms of administrative units, mainly groupings of administrative units into one statistical unit. This is important for data reporting using questionnaires.

With the introduction of the new system, the updating strategy has changed and, with it, the organisation of the department. More attention is paid to the large units. For the small units, the information of the BBR will be kept after automated processing. The agreed covenant with the Chambers of Commerce is very relevant, because they will become more responsible for delivering high quality statistical features such as the SICcode, using methodology developed in co-operation with SN.

The operating structure of the BR department is changing as a consequence of the previous issues. For the large units, the focus will be on the individual profiling (micro approach) while, for the smaller units,the focus must be from a more macro approach. SN’s efforts must correlate with the impact of these units on statistical output. This will require a major change in the mind set of staff and it will have to be introduced gradually. Manual efforts should shift into weak areas for example.

b.Last year a pilot project started with a top 10 of large businesses and dealing with them in a fully centralised statistical process. This implies the profiling in statistical units, the data collection and data processing. This should lead to full consistency of statistical data for these businesses across all statistics in which they appear. Since the pilot seems to be a big success, the number of units to be dealt with in this way is being increased substantially.

c. SN has the lead in a consortium with the NSIs of Germany, Hungary, United Kingdom and a private ITcompany, whichcarries out a pilot project ordered by the European Commission on the development of a European register of multinational enterprise groups (EuroGroupsRegister). This project runs till the end of this year. The main objectives of the project are:

• to put into place the elements of the required infrastructure to create and maintain an integrated database on multinational group links, which contains links of control and ownership, provided by private sources, completed and checked by the member states, including a routine for receiving and integrating the data coming back from the member states, a procedure to consolidate these data into enterprise groups, a routine and a protocol for transmitting extracts of this register to the member states.
• to test the feasibility of the proposed procedures to collect and consolidate the information;
• to identify potential problems in the full scale implementation of the project;
• to estimate the resources needed to fully implement and run a EuroGroupsRegister.

3. Issues and problems unresolved

The current version of the BBR is still elementary, but very important as a source for the BR. To get more benefit of the BBR, it must be used as the basic administrative source for most official administrative processes with businesses. It has been decided that the BBR will be developed as a successor of the current trade register that is kept by the Chambers of Commerce. The program of requirements has been set up, and procedures to reach agreement in the political and legal domain got started. A proposal for legislation will be discussed in Parliament soon.

In 2008, the revised NACE must be introduced in statistics. The national version of the SIC, which is fully compatible with NACE, has been agreed. Recoding of the units will be done in cooperation with the Chambers of Commerce. Plans on processing this operation are being developed. Studies have started on effects on the continuity in statistics, since many changes in the BR are not real changes. It is the intention to have a pure recoding process, as far as possible.

4. Future plans

Emphasis in the near future remainson further streamliningthe statistical processes, improving the quality of statistics and improving efficiency. The Business Register has to support the compiling of high quality statistical output. At Statistics Netherlands this means:

-High quality output with minimal administrative burden. One instrument is to strengthen the role of the BR in linking administrative data sources. This should lead to a further decrease of direct data collection by SN.

-Improving the role of the BR in monitoring continuity of figures in time series.

-Improving the role of the BR in monitoring comparability of figures from different processes. For example the issue of comparability between the SBS and STS figures.

For the BR the development of functionalities, additional to the basic functionalities which already are part of the newly introduced system, will still require substantial efforts. Moreover, the BR should have the flexibility to play along with upcoming needs. These are expected from the actions mentioned in the beginning of this report, but, in a wider context, also from actions for a further improvement of the image of Statistics Netherlandsin Dutch society and the community.