Johanna Leivo, Statistikcentralen, Johanna.Leivo@stat.fi

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During the past years the Finnish authorities have paid particular attention to reporting obligations of enterprises and how to ease their administrative burden.

In March 2009 the Government approved the action plan for the reduction of the administrative burden on businesses for 2009-2012 by 25 per cent compared to the 2006 level by the end of 2012. This reduction goal is targeted at national legislation and official procedures alongside the obligations of supranational legislation, the implementation of which allows national flexibility. The national action plan focuses on measures that de facto, and from the perspective of practical business, alleviate the administrative burdens of enterprises, thus enhancing their productivity and improving their competitiveness.

During 2007 Statistics Finland launched a development programme on developing business data collection 2007-2011. The development programme's main object is to develop respondent relations with better service and knowledge of the impacts and possibilities of data collections. The development programme involves several projects or functions, and proposes new ones. Each and every project/function has its own objective to execute the development programme's main object. The objectives are 1) to improve and harmonise data collection from enterprises and service to enterprise data suppliers, 2) to replace statistics-specific sample frames with a single frame (Business Register), 3) to co-ordinate samples, 4) to measure response burden and to reduce data supplier's response burden, 5) to contribute enterprise surveys usability, 6) to develop the relation with global and large companies, 7) to collect data direct from enterprises databases and 8) to develop return information from surveys to enterprises.

Possible benefits from the development programme and the projects or functions will be high-quality basic data and statistics and more effective data collection and better service to data suppliers.

Keywords: response burden, data collection, web-based data collection, administrative data, usability, sample co-ordination