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Regional workshop for African countries

Admin Data in South Africa

Statistics South Africa16-19 October 2007

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Legal Framework For Co-ordination

• The Statistics Act (No. 6 of 1999) defines the role of the Statistician-General both as the coordinator of national statistics nationwide and as the developer and enforcer of statistical standards

• South African Cabinet approved the National Statistics System (NSS) in Jan 2002

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Partnerships

• Education• Reserve Bank• Home Affairs• Dept of Agriculture• Minerals and Energy• Labour• Trade and Industry• South African Revenue Service

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Co-ordination of Economic Statistics

Important Supply side co-ordination with

• Reserve Bank ( National Accounts and Selected Surveys)

• South African Revenue Service ( Business Register)

Other players: • Trade and Industry ( Systems of Registrations) • Labour ( UIF)) • Municipalities ( Financial Data for Government

Accounts)

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SARS

• 1999 – Amendment to tax law to allow Stats SA to access all tax records

• Independent Business Register ( co-operation of 4 government departments)

• Data Quality uneven • Most important admin data – SARS – VAT

data• Key challenge – single business identifier

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Key Objectives of BR

• Reliable data for estimating movements and levels

• Data to estimate GDP • BR more challenging when it comes

to estimating employment owing to lack of a single business identifier

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Status Quo Pre Business Register

• Economic statistics dependent on a business register to develop sampling frames.

• Last economic census carried out in 1996• Business Address Register – A business

population built up from various censuses • Implications: from day one it became out

of date and decayed rapidly• How to compensate for new businesses

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Improvements as a result of the Business Register

Under the BR- there is a continuous updating of births.

However, we do not have a source for deaths. The problem with the BAR – dead from day 1 while

the BR is alive.The BR is built on the statistical units model –

enterprises and kind of activity unit and a local unit.

In practice, this is not very rosy. We have large businesses poorly profiled.

In sum: BR is alive and a units model underpinning it.

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Prerequisites for transferring from the Business

• Effective revenue service (strengthened in SA)

• Inhibiting issue is to resolve a number of sources ( match and clean inconsistencies in sources)

• No unique number and you get two sources- you soft match.

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Challenges

• the lack of a unique identifier for each business when engaging with different government spheres

• enterprises have completely different and independent numeric identifiers in the systems for IT, Skills Development Levy (SDL), Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF), PAYE and VAT.

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Challenges

• Introduction of a wage remuneration as a stratification variable despite the absence of a single business identifier

• The most serious challenge – is business profiling – large firms in South Africa as complex as you can get.

• Effective survey feedback

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Challenges

• Trade off between sustainability and coverage

• cannot fiddle around with coverage year to year as you have breaks in your series

• No administratively induced surprises ( amnesty)

• Business below the VAT threshold- reliance on income tax source – basic information on turnover