Quality issues in administrative registers

SMS 5-6 July 2018

Session 4 of the Agenda

Tirana, Albania

Torbiörn Carlquist

EUROSTAT Unit B3

Eurostat

Contents

1. Administrative register, system of registers

2. Quality issues, quality work

3. ADMIN project

Eurostat

Administrative register

• Database for use in administration, usually the state administration including agencies, institutes, ministries, but can also be employer organisations, trade unions, stock exchange, municipalities, and others

• Continuous update of the information in the registers as they are used and events are registered by the administration

• Economic and non-economic decisions by the administration based on the register; decisions to be stored in the register

• Persons, enterprises, farms, land, buildings as main types of objects in the registers

• Unique coding – personal ID number, enterprise number (VAT number)

• Registers as backbone of the functioning of a country

Eurostat

Adm. – statist. register

• Statistical registers are copies of Administrative registers, adjusted by NSI to suit statistical needs

• Mirroring of the administrative and statistical register is important

• Checking of the data in the register

• Missing values – match from other registers or impute

• Combine with other registers

• Adjust and clean all time references

• Create derived variables

• Statistical register is used for statistical production

Eurostat

Quality assurance of registers

• Regular contacts with owner of administrative register

• Check the adm. register when it is received at NSI

• Analyse reasons and extent of missing data in the register

• Analyse reasons and extent of mismatches when the register is combined with other registers

• Evaluate the quality of each variable

• Questionnaires for managing the register

• Investigate inconsistencies between different registers and report back to the owner of administrative register

• Structured documentation at a detailed level

• Indicators can be constructed for the various tasks in quality assurance

• l

System of statistical registers

Employment,

Salaries,

Occupation

Enterprises, Local units,

Company accounts

Value Added Tax,

International trade,

Vehicles

Properties, Buildings,

Apartments,

GIS

People,

Households,

Education,

Social benefits,

Vehicles,

Causes of death

Code of property (land)

Personal ID number

Address

VAT number, company code

Eurostat

System of statistical registers

• Advantage for NSI is the many potential combinations and the frequent tabulation from a system of registers

• Inconsistencies between different registers must be understood by NSI

• The quality will improve gradually in the system of registers

• The more the registers are used for statistical production, the likelier that errors are detected and properties of the various registers understood by the NSI

• The ID key, on which matching is done, also has quality issues• Addresses are probably of lower quality than personal ID numbers and this affects the

matching of registers, depending on which key is used for the matching

• If administrative registers are not national (but municipal or regional) – increased complexity for the statistical office

Eurostat

Quality 1 - coverage

• Under-coverage in the register• In a population register: When not all births or immigrants are

registered

• Illegal immigrants supported by own networks for health, schools

• Short-term immigrants should not be registered as resident pop.

• If a farm register is based on applications for monetary support, farmers who do not apply are missing

• Over-coverage in the register• Risk for duplicate records in the administrative register

• In a population register: Not all deaths or emigrants are registered

• Pension rights and other benefits may be lost if the emigrant announces the emigration to the administration

• For non-reported emigration, check the footprint of persons in various administrative registers and procedures. If somebody is inactive, the traces are reduced.

Eurostat

Quality 2 - timing

• Updates of registers• Frequency of updates in the administrative register – usually

continuous (day-to-day)

• Frequency of creation of the statistical register as a copy of the administrative register

• Important to have fixed dates/locking of registers, to be able to see information (population, values etc.) at precise historical dates/times (or make registers searchable on reference date)

• Delay between event and registrationThe time from immigration until residence permit can often be measured in months

• Combination of registers• Registers are linked on a common identity code, but reference

dates may be different for the individual linked registers. Appears as a coverage issue, but the reason for mismatching is the events that take place between the different reference dates

Example: travel-to-work statistics based on employment and population registers – unrealistic commuting may appear because of the difference in reference dates

Eurostat

Quality 3 - misuse

• Many reasons for misuse of administrative registers • To receive benefits despite not having the right to them

Pensions – conditions of length of residence within the country

Married couples are in some cases treated favorably from a taxation perspective

Social benefits – to be "creative" to fulfil the criteria for eligibility

• To pay lower tax depending on where the residence within the country (or between countries) is

If municipality taxes vary

Place of headquarters of multinational enterprises depending on tax rules

Tax and insurance for cars are different from one country to another

Eligibility for tax breaks for enterprises sometimes depends on the NACE code

• Criminal and fraud activities – to systematically misuse loopholes in the administration

• To hijack another person's identity and then commit crimes in the name of the hijacked person

Or to register fake identities to avoid prosecution after committing crime and fraud

• To present wrong information at immigration in the hope to have a bigger chance for a residence permit

Eurostat

Quality 4 – certain groups • Population groups with risk for under coverage or wrong place

• Students do not always follow rules about residence (place of study or place of residence of parents) – rules not always clear

• Foreign born persons who return to country of origin without telling the authorities (pattern varies by country of origin)

• Certain ages, such as 20-25 and over 75 (caring homes) – lower quality in place of residence expected in registers

• Persons with zero or low income – lower quality expected in registers

• Partial missing values – how to correct them

• Enterprises with risk for coverage issues• Inactive enterprises that are still registered for tax (VAT)

• Some might set up advanced business structures ("empty" units, inaccurate/biased reporting of employees etc.)

• Very small enterprises; Enterprises without employees

• Actors in the non-observed economy are not in business register

Eurostat

Quality work

• Owners of administrative register• Measure quality of the administrative register as this has a direct

impact on decisions, measures and planning by the administration

• Be aware of consequences of errors in the register – erroneous payments of benefits, planning errors, theft of identity for criminal purposes, reduced trust in the administration

• Make controls of the correctness of information in the register

• Statistical office• Work on quality assurance (see separate slide)

• Need metadata of the administrative register from the owner

• Changes in laws and rules for administrative purposes may cause breaks in time series in statistics based on adm. register

Sickness insurance paid from the first day of sickness, or from 2nd, 3rd day etc.

• Provide feedback to the owner of the administrative register about all quality issues found by the NSI

Eurostat

Quality work - NSI

• Methodological work• Quantifying quality of registers is more difficult than for surveys

and it is a very different task for the methodologist

• Documentation – use qualitative info about registers, based on experience in working with statistical registers

• Errors in addresses can be estimated by asking for return receipts when sending out tax forms or voting cards to large segments of the population

• Use sample surveys to find errors in register – but often the proportion of errors is too small to be effectively detected in sample surveys

• Imputing missing information for certain variables in registers

• Statistical methodology work and IT issues for registers are linked

• Need for statisticians and IT staff to cooperate

Eurostat

Quality at different steps

• Investigate the quality of:• The administrative system where the adm. register is used

• The processes used by NSI to create the statistical register

• The combined quality in terms of coverage, consistency, variables that is available in the system of statistical registers

• The statistical output from the registers, possibly in combination with other sources

Eurostat

ESS Vision 2020

• ADMIN project

• The following slides are borrowed from a presentation to the Eurostat Working Group on Quality on 15/06/2018 by Fabian Bach, Unit for Population and Migration statistics at Eurostat

• Output from the ADMIN project can be found here:

• https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/ess-vision-2020-admin-administrative-data-sources_en

ADMIN data in multisource statistics

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Outputs

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use for survey frames: directly or to supplement / update

(partly) replace data collection: e.g. business tax data

survey

direct tabulation

Graph idea: ONS

Registers

Admin data

Surveys

Full enumeration

• as a single variable

• editing, imputation, validation

• indirect use

(calibration, estimation, …)

• in evaluation, including data

confrontation

(e.g. comparison of survey

estimates with related ADMIN

estimates)

Generic Statistical

Business Process Model =

Multisource data: use examples

Main challenges for ADMIN sources

Access to data and influencing

sources

Methodology for integration

Quality (input, throughput,

output)

IT and security

Privacy and confidentiality

ESS.VIP ADMIN project (2015-2019)

2. Statistical methods

5. Frames for social statistics

6. Pilot studies & applications

7. Methodologic

al support

4. Eurostat as user of EC data

1. Access to & development

of sources

Approved by ESSC: support the ESS to make better use of available ADMIN data without compromising on quality

work

packages

3. Quality

Involving Member States

• Governance:

ADMIN Steering Group: 2 meetings per year AT + BE + DK + EL + ES + HR + IT + PL + SI + FI + UK

Reports to ESS Directors (methodology, social statistics)

• Technical level:

ADMiN network of national contact points + newsletter

ESSnet grant: quality of multisource statistics AT + DK (coordinator) + HU + IE + IT + LT + NL + NO

Task Force on frames in social statistics AT + BG + DE + DK + FR + RO + SI + UK

presentations in Working Groups today

WP3

ADMIN: key results

Guidelines

Best practices

WP6 grant summary reports social/business/agricultural stats. + quality lessons learned + knowledge transfer

Multisourcecombination +

estimationmethods

Access to ADMIN sources

Use of registersfor frames

2019

Q2/18

Quality of framesfor socialstatistics today!

Multisourcequality

Eurostat

Eurostat's dedicated website: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat