Report from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council on the implementation of Regulation (EC) No 177/2008 of 20 February 2008 establishing a common framework for business registers for statistical purposes and repealing Council Regulation (EEC) No 2186/93

Regulation (EC) No 177/2008 (the "BR Regulation") establishes a common framework for business registers for statistical purposes. It entered into force on 25 March 2008 and repealed Regulation (EEC) No 2186/93 (the "repealed BR Regulation").

The BR Regulation aims at:
- high quality and harmonised statistical business registers in the Member States;
- improved statistics related to globalisation.
For these purposes the BR Regulation requires Member States to:
- take all measures necessary to ensure the quality of their business registers;
- transmit to Eurostat data on multinational enterprise groups and their constituent units.

In the long term the quality improvements of the statistical business registers are supposed to reduce the costs for the production of business statistics and the administrative burden on respondents. However, in the short and medium terms, the implementation of the BR Regulation implies some initial costs for National Statistical Institutes and some modest increase of the administrative burden, in order to reach the levels of quality and harmonisation necessary to allow the desired benefits. Article 6 of the BR Regulation requires a Commission report to the European Parliament and the Council on its implementation, “addressing in particular the cost of the statistical system, the burden on business and the benefits”.

This report examines the most important aspects of the implementation of the BR Regulation with regard to the measures taken by the Commission (Eurostat) and the impact of the BR Regulation on:
- the cost for the National Statistical Institutes and Eurostat (the statistical system);
- the administrative burden on the respondents;
- the benefits in terms of quality of the statistical business registers and improved statistical measurement of globalisation phenomena.

The timing of the report is related to the ongoing preparation of an encompassing and streamlined Framework Regulation Integrating Business Statistics and the consequent plans to repeal several Regulations, including the BR Regulation.

• Primary Source

EUR-Lex: COM(2015)90: Follow the progress of this report through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2015:090:FIN

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