Social security statistics: beyond registration F.P. Pijpers Team Social Security Demographic and Socio-economic statistics

Publications concepts 1 What are the foundations on the basis of which benefits statistics are published? Information extracted from (council) registers with a minimal amount of processing or Information that is further processed and corrected, taking account of in particular administrative delays but also other imperfections. the registration concept the transaction concept

Publications concepts 2 The first steps: data collection Reporting institutions have a register consisting of a number of variables: personal characteristics / benefits characteristics A subset of these variables is copied from the register into a small dataset The small dataset is uploaded to the secure data ingestion portal of Statistics Netherlands Statistics Netherlands immediately subjects the data to various quality control filters

Publications concepts 3 Registration concept publications Tables of aggregated data are filled directly from the register with the numbers/totals with which each of the various possible values appear, for each of the publication variables. The tables are published

Publications concepts 4 Transaction concept publications After receipt of register data for epoch t, the actual publication is suspended until data for at least one subsequent epoch has also been received (minimally t+1). All mutations that ought to already have been recorded for epoch t, but only appear in extracts received at t+1 (or later) are used to correct the numbers for epoch t. Records which show a particular benefit entitlement but for which no payment has been effectuated, neither in that epoch nor in the epochs immediately before or after, can be removed from the counts.

Publications concepts 5 What is the necessary / sufficient number of epochs to wait? For Statline (monthly) publications and other commissioned tables : two epochs suffices BUT this is a compromise between speedy publication vs. accuracy Additionalresource Additional resource: development of estimation / extrapolation method which uses the data that is already available (independently verified by methodological team) Definitive numbers appear on Statline two months later (Social Statistics Database provisional components) This depends on the intended use of the data

Publications concepts 6 Example: Total numbers of welfare benefits (WWB), normalised to the annual average. Above: 2007 Below: 2009

Does this affect external researchers? Publications concepts 7 NoStatistics Netherlands provides data extracted from the SSD. It is already the case that individual records are corrected for 6 months delayed information, across a wide range of data collections: micro-integration. YES The new transaction concept differs slightly from an existing method to produce the statistics persons in receipt of social security benefits. Those statistics will be brought into concordance with the new concept.

Publications concepts 8 Questions?