Data sharing and disseminating from Finnish Business Register Timo Laukkanen Wiesbaden City Group, International Round Table on Survey Frames November 2008, Paris

Statistics Finland/ Timo Laukkanen Contents Background and legislation on unit level data sharing Main avenues in data dissemination Experiences and benefits on unit level data dissemination Problems

Statistics Finland/ Timo Laukkanen Background and legislation Background Legislation and sound justification to BR data sharing Public variables  BI-code, name, postal address and code, telephone number  Legal form, ownership, activity code, domicile, language  Personnel, size class of personnel (local unit), size class of turnover  Code of import or export, relationships of enterprise groups Extensive use of administrative data Maintaining good relations with data providers and partners BR valuables Location and other local unit and LKAU information Total populations Bridge between different registers

Statistics Finland/ Timo Laukkanen Main avenues in data dissemination (1) Mass data deliveries free for further dissemination Web based enterprise lists Business services (Credit rating etc.) Part of business portals BR data use in administration Tax administration: enterprise revenue tax allocation, support information for various verification Disseminating Nace Rev2. values via Business ID-system (Tax Administration, Board of Patents and Registrations) Others: municipals and other regional authorities, pension institutions

Statistics Finland/ Timo Laukkanen Main avenues in data dissemination (2) Ad-hoc information services Automatic extractions of defined populations from BR service database Tailor made extractions and combining statistics to unit level data Statistics Finland’s Research Laboratory Mainly for economic research purposes Access to masked micro level data Containing several data sets including most important data from BR (legal unit, establishments, enterprise groups)

Statistics Finland/ Timo Laukkanen Opportunities and benefits Feedback from data users and enterprises themselves Increased knowledge about BR and BR data content Free ‘marketing channel’ for BR Free access to business listings to small enterprises Saving taxpayers money, co-operation and division of labour within administration Increasing goodwill among administrative data providers

Statistics Finland/ Timo Laukkanen Problems Confidentiality in large and small enterprises With large enterprises: threat of revealing sensitive information connected enterprises performance and competition with other enterprises. Disclosure problems. With small enterprises: threat of revealing sensitive information connected to proximity of private and business life. Restrictions to populations? Small business confidentiality problem in BR data sharing Not all enterprises are happy about data sharing…...but only small minority is actually opposing New areas of problem in BR Farms: family and enterprise mixed Enterprise groups: data exchange require changes in data sharing conventions