Statistics Estonia is taking active steps to reduce reporting burden

“Statistics Estonia is strenuously looking for ways to reduce the reporting burden of enterprises,” stated Mart Mägi, the new Director General of Statistics Estonia. “We are increasing the use of data from databases, i.e. register data, to pre-fill questionnaires and to partially or fully replace the questionnaires. In addition, sample surveys enable reducing the number of surveyed enterprises,” explained Mr Mägi.

Mart Mägi gives an example of three questionnaires that enterprises no longer have to submit this year or can submit in a reduced version. “In 2017, more than 300 road freight transport enterprises do not have to submit data with the questionnaire ‘Road transport’, because we can use estimates based on the data of another statistical activity. The indicators collected with the questionnaire ‘Pension funds 2016’ we now obtain from the websites of pension funds and the funds have been exempted from data submission. In addition, six large enterprises in the ownership of the state or local government are no longer required to complete the questionnaire ‘Financial indicators 2017’, as we receive their data from the information system on governmental accounts of the State Support Service Centre,” explained Mr Mägi.

In 2017–2018, the following activities have been planned in Statistics Estonia to reduce the administrative burden:

• starting from 2018, the enterprises that have joined the project “Reporting 3.0” can submit labour force and wages/salaries information automatically from accounting systems;
• in 2018, tax declaration data are planned to be used for the production of wages/salaries statistics and enterprises are asked to provide only the missing indicators;
• analysing the hourly datasets for electricity consumption received from the data warehouse of Elering in order to assess their suitability for producing statistics;
• in 2017, the possibility for using employment portals’ data for performing the statistical activity “Occupied posts and job vacancies” is planned to be investigated.

In order to fulfil the orders of ministries and international organisations, in 2017 Statistics Estonia performs 150 statistical activities, two thirds of which fully or partially use register data. Statistics Estonia collects additional data from enterprises only if the necessary data are not available in the registers, it is not possible to bring the register data into conformity with the definitions of official statistics, the data are generated in the registers too late or with varying frequency.

In 2011–2017, the number of registered companies in the Commercial Register has increased by a third to 180,000 enterprises and the number of active enterprises by nearly a quarter. At the same time, the number of entities with reporting obligation to Statistics Estonia has remained at 40,000 for the past few years due to the use of sample surveys and introduction of database data.