Simply 2010,
Conference on Administrative
Simplification in Official Statistics
The Conference was held as part of the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU in Ghent, Belgium, on 2 and 3 December 2010.
The Conference followed on from the 94th conference of the Directors General of the National Statistical Institutes (DGINS) in Vilnius, Lithuania, on the reduction of administrative burden caused by official statistics.
- Welcome speech by Annie Versonnen,
director-general a.i., Statistics Belgium
Statistics Belgium, a long-standing tradition of simplification
- Welcome Speech by Niko Demeester, Head of
Cabinet of the Minister of Enterprise of simplification
Reducing red tape in statistics
- Keynote speech by Walter Radermacher, DG Eurostat Chief Statistician of the EU
Priority setting, simplification and reduction of response burden in the ESS slides
- Synthesis by Stephan Moens
Response burden, quality and communication
Summing up Simply2010 in a few quotes
Statistics Belgium wins Agoria e-Gov Award
Statistics Belgium has won the 8th edition of the e-Gov
Awards of Agoria, the Belgian federation for the technology industry.
Agoria unites companies from the technological sector, which employs
approximately 275,000 people.
Statistics Belgium won the award for “Best Project” with its
simplification and automation project of SBS. Additionally our FPS won
the award for cost-effectiveness with the SOCTAR project. In previous
years the Agoria e-Gov Award went to the Federal Agency for the Safety
of the Food Chain (FASFC), the Crossroads Bank for Social Security (CBSS)
and the Administrative Simplification Service (ASS).
The
SBS project was launched as a response to demands from the business
world for simplification and cost savings concerning the Structural
Business Statistics Survey (SBS). Collecting statistics was simplified a
great deal by reducing the target group and survey frequency, and by
simplifying the questionnaire and variables, without affecting the
statistical relevance in any way. Also web surveys were automated to a
large extent, by combining a number of statistical techniques. Thanks to
a specific promotion and communications campaign, the new survey has
become a tremendous success. As much as 90% of all declarations were
filled electronically. This helped reduce the administrative burden for
enterprises by 2.17 million euro.
Our FPS also won the e-Gov Award for Cost-Effectiveness with SOCTAR.
This project has automated the allowances for a social tariff for
electricity and/or gas. Before 1 July 2009 customers needed to
personally file a request to their energy supplier to apply the social
tariff. This is no longer the case.
