Björn Thornadtsson

Senior Statistician

Statistics Sweden

1. Status and update on progress of the Business Register

The Business Register Unit (FDB) is a part of the department of Economic Statistics. It currently has around 35 staff and it is organised in three groups responsible for the content of the register including register maintenance, commission-based activities and IT-activities. The Business Register has a twofold purpose, serving as a public register (administrative) and a statistical register. It is also an important component in the Swedish Register System. The coverage and the role of the Business Register are largely governed by regulations and ordinances and by agreements within the Swedish and European statistics systems.

A new process-oriented organisation was discussed at Statistics Sweden in 2003 and the first results could be seen in 2004. Among other things, a new organisational unit (FU) will be responsible for the collection of economic statistics and for large and complex enterprises. As a consequence of the process-orientation also other organisational questions have been raised. These concern the collection of Business Register data, the organisation of IT staff and also the balance and the dimensioning between the present organisational units and new units when tasks are moved or new tasks are created.

The decisions that have been taken up to now will influence the Business Register in the following way. FU will be responsible for the collection of data for the 50 largest enterprise groups in the Business Register. FDB will have the responsibility for all administrative registers within the department of Economic Statistics. There will not be any transfer of personnel from FDB to FU.

2. Issues and problems resolved during the past year

Different activities have been carried through to inform different statistical programs about the Business Register and to discuss different ways to facilitate the deliverance of feed-back to the register. Contacts have been established between persons responsible for different parts of the Business Register and corresponding statistical programs and products.

A quality survey has been conducted. The purpose is to give a picture of the quality in the Swedish Business Register. The method and the result will be presented in session 5- BR Quality Indicators and Coverage.

There is an ongoing work to improve the quality in the links between the registers in the Swedish Register system. We have now completed the first step to improve the link between the Business Register and the Estate Register by harmonising the address information at the local unit level.

We have participated in the second harmonised collection on Business Demography. Due to problems within Eurostat the delivery was delayed. We have also participated this year even if there have been some problems to follow the timetable.

The project ¡°The Swedish Business Register out on Internet¡± has continued their work to develop a web-application for contacts with users, customers and data suppliers.

3. Issues and problems unresolved during the past year

Our intention is to continue the systematic work of profiling enterprises and as a part of this work, also try to define more precise survival rules for statistical units. This work has been delayed. Now when the first decisions have been taken concerning the responsibility of large and complex enterprises, the future development in this area will be made by a joint group with people from the Business Register and the new organisational unit responsible for large and complex enterprises.

There has been an ambition to make a comparison between different kinds of demography products and also to describe the differences. Introductory meetings have been held where the products have been presented but due to lack of resources the more analysing work has not started yet.

4. Future plans

The main part of the new business register system was developed during 1999 and 2000. After this period there has been a period of consolidation. We have now made a pilot study to analyse the need of development for the next  4-5 years. The result has been presented in a report. The main purpose has been to identify different development activities, see how they should be prioritised and in what way they should be carried through. Initially we have identified seventeen development activities. The report has been presented in our Register Council where our internal users are represented. It was decided that special care should be taken to the demands of the National Accounts. This is in line with the ongoing ambition to improve the National Accounts.

Some of the development activities will be of higher priority than others. Beside the ambition to improve National Accounts, considerations must be taken to the following: the implementation of SNI 2007, the decision to exchange from Sybase to SQL server, changes in the Business Register Regulation and concequences of the ongoing reorganisation.

The responsibility for the development of the Swedish Register System, where the Business Register is one component, has been held on a new organisational unit. Previous each register has been responsible for their part but now there will be defined responsibility for the whole. The ambition is to improve the links, make descriptions on the content and to make the overall information more available for different users. 

The started work to create a process-oriented organisation will continue. We will have to produce different papers to shed light on issues where the Business Register is concerned and discussed. In the future we will must continuously adopt our work and organisation to new decisions.